Flash storage endurance

I agree it would be good to have good benchmarks - I'm just concerned that bad benchmarks are worse than no benchmarks, and it seems hard to design good benchmarks for this. The problem isn't necessarily that people would cheat, it's that the marketing people would tell the engineers to spend effort on legitimately increasing a benchmark number that does not meaningfully improve the customer experience, at the expense of something more useful.

Measuring the endurance of a particular flash chip doesn't sound like it should be too difficult; just do a load of writes until you see IO failures or data loss, and maybe do something to see how effective any wear-levelling is, and compare against the vendor's endurance guarantees to make sure they're not lying. But if you want to know how that affects the lifetime of a phone, you need to know the behaviour of the software on that phone, and you need to know what memory chip it uses (which is non-trivial since a single model of phone might use parts from multiple vendors at once, for supply chain diversification, and change parts over time to reduce cost), and that's not something a typical phone review site could feasibly do. CPU/GPU benchmarks are much easier since the relevant software is provided by the benchmark itself, and the hardware is usually consistent across a phone model (or if some are different then it's probably a whole different SoC and is very obvious), so measurements on a test device are likely to match customer devices.

To get realistic data about large populations, I guess you'd need access to automatically-uploaded error logs or customer support records to see how many users have encountered storage errors. That would be nice, but seems unlikely to happen.