Fairphone is a fairly young company (they’re only on their fifth device now, and the phone you’re complaining about was their third).
FP is young in terms of amount of phone models, but mature in terms of years of existence.
Hence, I follow you in accepting the phone model design may have more glitches than phones from other manufacturers, e.g. FP3’s bad fingerprint sensor.
In contrast, concerning processes, support and communication facing users, I agree with @Gerdi.V’s moderate posts (i.e. not deception in sense of fraud but fogging or the ballon metaphor): There are so many forum threads about issues like lost data (think of local contacts) or lost functionality (think of brightness or bluetooth) or spare parts being unavailable for weeks/months. We also repeatedly read “we listened” and “we learned”, plus we users do propose quite concrete solutions (e.g. software updates testing and communication of known issues), but still, history continues to repeat: Spare parts are unavailable for longer time (have they really been ordered already when stock was still well filled but reduced much quicker than anticipated? if so, why is this information so hard to find?), the software update screen does still not mention a “known issues list or link” enabling users to easily avoid loss of data/functionality that is important to them, it does not even link to already existing page OS Release Notes informing about intended changes, etc.
As this pattern repeats since years, I have the impression FP does observe users loose their data or hit personally severe issues, but tolerate or neglect it instead of wholehearted tries to avoid it – really fair or respectful towards clients is different. I doubt I will buy another mobile by FP but instead shift or rephone.