Fair question. My experience is precisely the same as others have posted on Reddit. Fully charged Pixel 4xl, working flawlessly for a couple of years, updated to android 13. 3 days later, wake up, it's fully charged, alarm works as expected, android auto works as expected, connects to work wifi as expected, lay it down on desk, 2 hr later pick it up: Brick. Won't charge, won't respond to a known working pixel charger and charger cable. Holding down power 60+ seconds. Nothing. Hold down power and vol down, vol up... doesn't matter. It is a brick. Connect to computer at home, the Qcomm USB thing is seen in device manager but no driver exists that will let you access the memory in the phone. Did a "Find My Device" even after holding down the power button for a couple of minutes. It found it as well as it would find any brick: nada.
This story is repeated numerous times across Pixel 3,4,5 models... and I have seen bricking posts on the 6 along with many problems with the 6, but I did not dive as deeply into those, admittedly. But gosh oh golly gee, I'm sure Google overnight changed their QA policies to magically make their quality so much better with the PixelBrick 6 and 7 after 5 iterations of prior PixelBricks. Most state the issue occurs after 2-3 years, so, if you have income to drop $800 every 2-3 years on a phone, buy this year's PixelBrick. Now, do the same sort of search for "Samsung Bricked" and the posts are far fewer. Heck, Android Authority had a separate article on the Pixel 3 Brick phenom. And yes, you're right. What good is 5 years of updates for a brick? It's not. I'll pass on Pixels. I have never, ever had a phone over the past many years that died like this... all gave warning signs and even then, did not brick so that I could still use them as webcams. No more PixelBricks for me. The Google employees posting here can continue to get them on their discounts, but I'll take a hard pass.