I'm not in the iPhone ecosystem anyway, so it's probably moot, but one thing Google did really right this year was to issue Pixel 9 Pro and Pro XL that are identical in everything but the screen size. I'm very happily upgrading from a very large 8 Pro to a nicely pocketable 9 Pro that contains all the same guts as the 9 Pro XL. Apple should have done the same.
The Pro and Pro Max are like you say with the sole exception of optical zoom level. OP is referring to the non-pro models at the end when talking about ProMotion (there are 4 main variants each release, not 2).
