Professional photography and videography gear has always only been about that though. It broadens the range of shots you can get and/or the efficiency of the process (and usually puts up with more abuse).
For example, cheaper camera gear would have worse low light sensitivity, meaning you’re either getting grainy images or you need extra lighting. As cameras improved, fewer compromises need to be made and you can get the result you want.
With infinite creativity and luck you can always get something get if you try long enough, but great gear really does open the door to more options and opportunities to catch a good shot.
Another good example is sports photography, where fast imaging is mandatory for capturing movement shots. With slower cameras your only option would be to catch slower, more stationary moments.
Modern phone cameras seem to perform at least as well as I remember early fancy digital cameras performing, and they really are good enough for a lot of purposes. (But they still can’t do a good job of blurring the background. I keep expecting ML advances to improve this, but even latest-generation iPhones produce pretty bad results IMO in portrait mode.)
We aren’t disagreeing. But it’s mostly at the fringe where you can’t do anything at all with meh gear.
Gear matters for things like that.
Scarcity is the spark that ignites creativity.
Put another way, look how many shite films Hollywood makes, and they have top gear.
Great gear will never save a lack of creativity, lack of vision, etc.
Elsewhere in thread it's correctly noted that in a lot of cases lighting is more important that cameras anyway. But similarly, you have to know how to set up - same applies though, the gear can't do the setup for you.
You can't even judge the output of the gear by what Hollywood puts out. Maybe the gear does make a huge difference. For all we know every shot out of the camera is breathtaking, but it doesn't matter if by the time it gets to the screen they've barfed orange and teal all over it, darkened it to the hide bad CGI, and edited it to assault the viewer with a muddy blur of special effects and fast cutting.
I hate the fake interpolated frame rates on recent TVs. But if we started legitimately shooting at 48 FPS, I think we'd get over the "video"-ness of it.