Some points you can't really refute are cost and repairability. Yes, they're expensive and yes, they're quite difficult to repair, there's no getting around that. One thing you don't have to worry about is the screen though. I'm not sure what people have told you about it being "better," because at this point most phone screens are pretty incredible; great brightness, contrast, oled, 120hz. Where foldables do shine is content consumption. I use my phone A LOT. And trust me when I say that the experience is pretty unparalleled. Multitasking, large video streams, gaming, browsing Reddit and now Lemmy were all absolutely incredible experiences and I can never go back to a slab phone. I bought both the 14 pro max and the pixel 7 pro to try to come back but it's just not the same at all.

And the crease thing 100% disappears after 1 hour of using it. A lot of people hear about the crease, decide they don't like it, try to have a hands on, see the crease and focus solely on it the whole time saying to themselves, I hate the crease, why would anyone buy this. It's analogous to when apple did the notch; tech people were like what the fuck is apple doing, why are they making phones so ugly, I use that part of the screen, Samsung made mocking ads about it. And now every phone on the market has some variant of it because people learned it's really not a big deal. Your fingers never go in the middle of the screen to feel it and as long as you have your phone on like 10% brightness it will wash out the crease from being apparent if you look at it dead on.

Trust, next time you're at best buy check out Google or Samsung's offerings. The phones are incredible.