> Give it a camera module from a midrange 2017 smartphone and use the latest image processing tricks, and you'll blow almost any webcam on the market today.
Sorry, that's exactly the strategy of these webcam startups, and Apple with the Studio Display, and the results empirically suck. Even if you could get 2017 smartphone quality (which is still apparently an unsolved problem), why should you settle for that in a webcam that doesn't need to fit in your pocket or run on a tiny battery or cost a tiny fraction of the BOM of a much more complex device? We should be doing way better than that. And way better is definitely possible.