You sure that's ARM's fault? How big are these lower end SoCs and what process are they made on? It used to be that smaller processes cut your cost per transistor almost in half, but that's been declining over the past decade or more and now with N3 the cost per transistor is hardly decreasing at all between the inability to shrink SRAM cells and the declining ability to shrink logic combined with the higher per wafer cost due to more EUV layers.
If ARM prices themselves out of the market these lower end SoCs will start using RISC-V cores. ARM doesn't want that kind of thing to get started, because once it does it will only snowball as RISC-V support in Android improves, more RISC-V core designs are available cheap (or even free if someone like TSMC or Snypnoses commissions the core designs and offers them to their customers as part of the package)
