Yes, yes. I also would consider myself highly aware of my phone, and I have called back spam callers I don't know how many times from both the "Recents" tab and the notification screen. I'm generally impressed with the usability of Apple's default apps, so this one stands out. You'd really think the "Phone" app on the "iPhone" would be a bit better thought out.
I think the problem is that the Phone app has a lot of legacy behavior from the early days of the iPhone when people actually used the phone functionality. As the sibling commenter notes, they only recently changed the incoming call notification to not take over the entire screen regardless of what else you were doing. It's just not totally fixed yet.
And the thing is: this is better than it used to be.
At least every single phone call doesn’t interrupt at the absolute highest level of priority and take over your screen entirely. Up until…iOS 14?…you didn’t really have a choice to not deal with an incoming call while using the phone: a call immediately took over.
I think a lot of non tech people would REALLY benefit from a setting to "confirm before dialing" in ios.
For example, touching ANYTHING in the phone app will immediately dial that number.
That leads to real problems with inexperienced users, who then get the mindset that they're not good with tech.
To be clear - the blame here is 100% on apple.
Most people I know have butt dialed. I consider myself highly aware of my phone, yet have accidentally called back spam callers. yikes!