My area is eastern europe. Where an iphone is like 3-4 minimum wage salaries or so. People take loans to buy iphones! And you could probably also correlate them with luxury item buyers, around here.

Good thing the US message color thing is isolated over there and the peer pressure on Gen Alpha hasn't reached us.

But yes, I stick to my claim. You don't have to hard press those people to tell you that they don't use phones "for poor people" . The idiom is local and used both ironically and literraly.