I feel the later generation of phones went back a bit as they have more aggressive processing. It can work great, but the hit or miss ratio is worse, in particular noise processing can be way off.
That's crazy the budget Pixel a lone gets overall better photos than a top of the line iPhone.
I preferred it when they saved the original and processed photos. Now there is no way to turn it off.
Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered.
This has happened to me way too many times. I take a picture, it looks great, then shortly after it gets processed so badly it's all blurred up with no return because of some forced long exposure low light compensation feature that cannot be disabled.