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I disagree on multiple points.

1. Nowadays, the main use of phones is as multimedia devices (gaming, movies, facebook...). You need as large screen for this as possible. Everybody will agree that selfies look soooo much better on a larger screen :-)
The average user will cope with some usability issues to gain advantages of a larger screen. Simple as that. Note that I am talking about the average user here.

2. You are writing the article implying that Apple is the driver of the large screen devices. This is not true...
Before iPhone 6 there were several large-screen android devices (by Samsung for example) which were very successful. iPhone sales were going down and people wanted larger screens. Apple just followed the trend despite Steve Jobs' claim that "You can't get your hand around it, no one's going to buy that."

3. The only way manufacturers can force a larger screen on you is if they don't sell smaller screens. However, last time I was at a phone shop there were lots of models running Android with smaller screens... not sure about iPhones.