Hear me out here:
The Essential Phone was let down by a LOT of other factors. Camera Quality was the biggest for sure, but also the touch screen could be glitchy and in general not as responsive as it's peers. Lack of wireless charging, poor marketing, etc...
But...
As far as design goes; how it felt in the hand, the size of it, the build materials (ceramic and titanium), the screen-to-body ratio, the weight, even simply how it felt in the back pocket of your jeans. I have never met it's equal.
So much so that there is STILL a dedicated group keeping her going through projects like LineageOS and e/OS.
Heck, I still use it as my daily driver (on e/os) and ever time I think I'm going to put my sim-card into something slightly newer because the Essential doesn't have 5G, I quickly realize that I don't really need 5G that damn badly after all and I switch back.
Someday, the battery will stop holding a charge for more than a day and a half. Or someday, I'll drop it and the ultimate failure of the Ceramic back will slap me in the face. And on that day I'll be sad.
I was a tech-manager at Staples when those launched and it was an absolute shit-storm right from the start with returns and complaints.
The only thing crazier from that time was an HP WebOS tablet (I can't remember the name) that launched with pretty big fanfare with HP trying to take a marketing page out of Apples playbook, only to have it fail so completely that they announced a week later that support was being dropped and any remaining stock was offered to anyone who wanted at 99 bucks.
Wild days indeed.