300-400$ range phones work perfectly well for years and there's now even a staggering amount of pretty good phones covering most usecases from companies like Xiaomi that can be bought for as low as 150$ and they still run about as well as an iPhone 5c.
So they run as well as a 4 year old phone with a 5 year old CPU/GPU? Sounds... not good. Not to mention you can get that 5C for about $100 today, so $50 less than your Xiaomi.
My point was - they run well enough, do their job and are really affordable (after all, people were happy with performance of iPhone 5 / 5C weren't they ;).
iPhones (especially refurbished ones) aren't here (I do understand that situation in US is a bit better).
300-400$ range phones work perfectly well for years and there's now even a staggering amount of pretty good phones covering most usecases from companies like Xiaomi that can be bought for as low as 150$ and they still run about as well as an iPhone 5c.