I do ranch work in a place with a lot of iron in the soil. I often have these sand sized grains of dirt in my port. But I had it in a lightning days as well. I just hate ports.
Before MagSafe, this used to kill phones. Now my son has a phone without a port, but it’s not dead.
This seems like the ideal use case for those 'rugged' phone cases with flaps over the ports, no? Not ideal, but certainly a lot easier than having to clean gunk out of the port constantly.
Those ports are most of the time, at least in the android land IDK about iphone, on daughter boards and easy to replace. Even though in a perfect world this should not happen, still it is possible to do without too much of a hastle