I think it wasn’t about low end phones in themselves. The Moto G series is an example of a cheap phone that doesn’t include a lot of bloat. Really it would be easy for cheap phones to just leave the OS alone, keep it open so that users could update it if they wanted. That’s what the Nexus program did as well. But they don’t sell nearly as well as the base Samsungs. Samsung has more marketing and carrier relationships to fall back on, but that means more corporate shenanigans adding unnecessary nonsense to the OS like Facebook installed by default and non-removable, etc. And no updates, plus no way for advanced users to install updates