I’m not sure what your point is. If you want to attach an external keypad to your phone, those certainly exist. A touchscreen is a trade-off between shitty button feel vs. profoundly expanded UI flexibility, making it a much more general purpose input device. Touchscreens are not built into phones because they are cheaper than buttons.
If you want a phone that does nothing but make phone calls using numerical codes, nice physical buttons are surely better. If you want a “phone” that does 1000 other things, the physical buttons are untenable.
I think desktop computers should come with much better physical keyboards (ideally properly hand-shaped instead of stupid rectangular slabs) with nice buttons and many analog inputs (trackballs, sliders, jog wheels, ...), but for a pocket device forget it.
They are popular primarily because they're as cheap as they can possibly get - they have no moving parts. It's a combination of worst aspects of physical buttons (non-reconfigurable) and touchscreens (no tactile feedback).
If you want a phone that does nothing but make phone calls using numerical codes, nice physical buttons are surely better. If you want a “phone” that does 1000 other things, the physical buttons are untenable.
I think desktop computers should come with much better physical keyboards (ideally properly hand-shaped instead of stupid rectangular slabs) with nice buttons and many analog inputs (trackballs, sliders, jog wheels, ...), but for a pocket device forget it.