You're right and OC is wrong. My Nexus 5 from 2013 could take decent single exposure night sky photos (after post processing the RAW images). The Google camera now just automates most of the manual work (adjusting exposure/sensitivity, stabilizing, aligning and stacking multiple images, post processing) see https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/11/astrophotography-with-nigh...

I'm sure the iPhone is just as capable