Phones over-beautifying faces by default already happened with the iPhone XS, and it wasn't received well. See #beautygate: https://www.imore.com/beautygate
>".... if they can detect and preserve fabric, rope, cloud, and other textures, why not skin texture as well?"
The phone changed the image on skin and not on random other things that wasn't a face. That is a filter, not normal image processing, when it happens only on X but not on Y. The only way to not get this filter on the phone is using RAW.
That is the opinion of an uninformed tech writer, and even besides that, he's not claiming it did happen but just that it could possibly happen.
In this case you do have someone who knows how it works, that someone being me.
> The phone changed the image on skin and not on random other things that wasn't a face.
There are some reasons you'd want to process faces differently, namely that viewers look at them the most, and that if you get the color wrong people either look sickly or get annoyed that you've whitewashed them. Also, when tone mapping you likely want to treat the foreground and background differently, and people are usually foreground elements.
Yes and then you have applied a filter.
They call it 'instagram look' for quite some time, Apple is the worst among all phone manufacturers (in form of furthest from actual ugly reality, but a lot of people got used to it and actually prefer it now), but all of them are making it.
If you want pores you need a higher resolution sensor, but even most of those have physical low pass (blur) filters because most people don't like moiré artifacts. Could try an A7R or Fuji X-series.