You're someone who is comfortable in a terminal desktop environment on Linux. What you or I do for storage is irrelevant to the wider consumer market.
Apple's hardware prices mean that millions of people buy the smallest on offer and pay Apple monthly instead. It's a deliberate play for recurring services revenue.
My point is this: would they buy a phone that had virtually-zero free storage and rely solely on iCloud? Probably.
Some of them had 64GB models, in my view they are already doing that!
I don't know, do these small-storage-size models actually have that big a market share compared to the others?
They also sell 1 TB iPhones and I think on the latest generation the minimum storage has been increased. If nobody bought them they wouldn't sell them (see the lack of newer "mini" models).
I always thought that these models with tiny storage and tiny ram (for laptops) where just so that they could hook you with a low "starting from" price.
My point wasn't that "nobody falls into apple's trap", I'm sure plenty do. Rather, unless you're sure your audience is representative of the "wider consumer market", just asking them if they pay for icloud and they say yes, it doesn't prove much.