With the frustration of the past year in iPhone not unlocking due to your face mask it seems like a proof of concept that iPhone should bring back TouchID.
Weirdly enough, facial recognition works for me with a mask already, but only if I take off my glasses.
I feel like mine did too towards the beginning of the pandemic, but not anymore.
Partway into the pandemic Apple added mask detection, so if it sees a mask it will fail instantly and not even attempt face recognition (so people could enter their passcodes right away without having to wait for face recognition to fail).
They also supposedly added the mask recognition "cut-off" because the ML was mistakenly learning people's masks and you could impersonate some people by wearing the same mask as they regularly wore. Another case where statistic models were likely to learn the wrong things.