Unfortunately, not everyone has the same amount of hand sensitivity and force(/pain) perception. What may feel like an unreasonable amount of force to you may be barely noticeable and effortless to someone who normally works with things requiring much higher forces.
I literally can't be as gentle as professionals are for this exact reason. That's why I'm glad most of these things are pretty robust.
I have had trouble in the past because of this, usually not with small electronics. I busted a 4-pin Molex in a computer trying to plug it in with the pins not lined up quite right. It does require a decent bit of force, but accidentally breaking things is not uncommon for me because I just can't tell when I'm going too far. Same with screws, I pretty much always overtorque screws if I do it by hand.
The actual issue I have with phones isn't that the connectors/cables break apart if you look at them funny, it's actually the god damn screens are insane to deal with and replace, with all of that adhesive crap.
This all to say, I think Apple is doing poorly here, their ribbon cables should probably be more robust on these often quite expensive devices. I know they can do it because I've experienced Apple devices with pretty robust internals... (and also similarly, have seen and heard of Apple devices where they've mysteriously cheaped out on components like voltage regulators and made their devices totally unnecessarily worse and more failure prone.)