As I've been learning to shoot on a dslr I've been very impressed with how much modern smart phones are doing for you. Focus, sharpness, and exposure are usually very good with little to no effort.
The colors are a bit exaggerated in consumer film, like the Kodak Gold which the author is shooting. Kodak wants people to come back from vacation with nice, colorful pictures. You can get the same, vivid colors in digital, but I think most digital cameras (including phones) just default to a more naturalistic look—IMO, I am so happy with the default colors on most digital cameras, compared to the brighter color settings you’d get from consumer film. One of the big ways you get colors to pop in film is by adjusting the contrast. You’ll notice that film pays for that contrast and color with reduced detail in the shadows and often garish-looking skin tones.
This is one reason why fancy digital cameras prefer to shoot in raw and log color spaces to help preserve the color data to grade that transition
I looked at those pictures and had the opposite feeling.
I was surprised how bad they are from a pure quality aspect.
I assume the jpeg and scanning is a very hard limiting factor.
I can get a lot of range when shooting raw with my canon 80d.
If you look at the top picture in the post then I'd have more dynamic range with my DSLR for most of that picture, but the parts in direct sunlight would be completely clipped instead.