No, there really aren't. Trust me, I spent days researching this and ended up with the Pixel 3A phablet that I hate. There are exactly zero decent Android phones <= 4.7".

Same thing could be said about iphones, they make decent hardware, the problem is that they run ios.

Could you please list them? I don't see any modern Android phone of the size iphone 5. All androids are huge, even compared with iphone 8.

Or that they don't run real Android but some lagging downstream vendor-specific bloatware...

Personal preference is not a reason to post unhelpful comments. This isn't reddit.

Edit : typo