Not saying it's easy, but solving it in software is O(1) and solving it by calibrating each device is O(N), and allows you to be resilient to things like temperature deformations and other nasty things that can happen in the field.
I can't find the reference any more, but one particularly impressive result was a four-wheeled robot that could tolerate the loss of a wheel, distortions of the entire chassis, and multiple faulty sensors all at the same time!
The browser doesn't let you collect all this sensor data.
Mobile Safari doesn't tell you the known camera calibration.
The Apple Vision Pro doesn't give you any data at all.
Nonetheless, 8thwall's XR8 takes seconds to calibrate absolute scale. It has to do device lookup for approximate calibrations for your iPhone model.
If I bought a car and 5 min into driving it tells me that the camera system is defective you are not gonna have a happy customer.
Take the other example then: "pre flight calibration when one first takes it out of the box".
If there was an issue with the camera system it could be caught at that time.
It even has an option in the user Service menu to recalibrate them.
For critical imaging, you still want to calibrate, but the gap between explicit calibration and "implicit calibration" (just using your subject matter) is definitely getting smaller, and quickly.