>For instance a phone can do a great job in a backlit scenario by intelligently cutting the highlights and boosting the shadows. The resulting image shows both the subject and background clearly but it doesn't represent the real-word lighting conditions. As a result it's great for a quick snapshot but is less useful in an artistic sense.

This seems completely backwards to me. Artistic photography isn't about representing real-world lighting conditions as perceived by humans. Just putting a polarizing filter on a camera changes how the image looks from the way the scene actually appears to humans. Artistic photography routinely does very bizarre stuff with colors to achieve an artistic effect. Even Ansel Adams experimented with solarization, one of the earliest photographic effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarization_(photography)

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that photography has never been about accurately showing real-world lighting conditions, but rather either an artistic or at least idealized version of a scene or subject.