You can achieve maybe a quarter of the kinds of shots on a phone that an interchangeable-lens camera will let you make.
That's an extremely important quarter! For most people it covers everything they ever want a camera to do. But if you want to get into the other 75%, you're never going to be able to do it with the enormous constraints imposed by a phone camera's strict optical limits, arising from the tight physical constraints into which that camera has to fit.
Whereas a $1500 Nikon 15MP from 20 years ago is real crisp, and I can put a 300mm lens on it if I want to "zoom in".
Even my old nikon 1 v1 with its cropped sensor 12MP takes "better pictures" than the two 108MP phone cameras.
But there are uses for the pixel density and I enjoyed having 108MP for certain shots, otherwise not using that mode in general.
People make much of whatever Samsung it was a couple years back, that got caught copy-pasting a sharper image of Luna into that one shot everyone takes and then gets disappointed with the result because, unlike the real thing, our brain doesn't make the moon seem bigger in pictures. But they all do this and they have for years. I tried taking pictures of some Polistes exclamans wasps with my phone a couple years back, in good bright lighting with a decent CRI (my kitchen, they were houseguests). Now if you image search that species name, you'll see these wasps are quite colorful, with complex markings in shades ranging from bright yellow through orange, "ferruginous" rust-red, and black.
In the light I had in the kitchen, I could see all these colors clearly with my eyes, through the glass of the heated terrarium that was serving as the wasps' temporary enclosure. (They'd shown a distinct propensity for the HVAC registers, and while I find their company congenial, having a dozen fertile females exploring the ductwork might have been a bit much even for me...) But as far as I could get the cameras on this iPhone 13 mini to report, from as close as their shitty minimum working distance allows, these wasps were all solid yellow from the flat of their heart-shaped faces to the tip of their pointy butts. No matter what I did, even pulling a shot into Photoshop to sample pixels and experimentally oversaturate, I couldn't squeeze more than a hint of red out of anything without resorting to hue adjustments, i.e. there is no red there to find.
So all I can conclude is the frigging thing made up a wasp - oh, not in the computer vision, generative AI sense we would mean that now, or even in the Samsung sense that only works for the one subject anyway, but in the sense that even in the most favorable of real-world conditions, it's working from such a total approximation of the actual scene that, unless that scene corresponds closely enough to what the ISP's pipeline was "trained on" by the engineers who design phones' imaging subsystems, the poor hapless thing really can't help but screw it up.
This is why people who complain about discrete cameras' lack of brains are wrongheaded to do so. I see how they get there, but there are some aspects of physics that really can't be replaced by computation, including basically all the ones that matter, and the physical, optical singlemindedness of the discrete camera's sole design focus is what liberates it to excel in that realm. Just as with humans, all cramming a phone in there will do is give the poor thing anxiety.
I think people mostly put up with it because on the one hand it doesn't matter all that often (sunset is a classic worst-case test for imaging systems!) and, on the other, well, "who are you going to believe? Fifty zillion person-centuries of image engineering and more billions of phones than there are living humans, or your own lyin' eyes?"
I still have to manually focus (by pushing the screen where i want it to focus), but on newer phones the focus tries to "track" what you touched, which is... why would they change that? I tilt the phone down to interact with it, i know where in the frame i want it to focus, because before i tilted the phone down, i was looking at the frame! Rule of thirds, i can reframe the image to put focus exactly in one of the areas it ought be, zoom in or out, whatever. But no, apparently it has been decided i want the focus to wander around as it sees fit.
I just unplugged the honor 8 to take a picture and apparently the battery is kaput since the last time i used it. Sad day, indeed.
http://projectftm.com/#H-6GJlHgGFA8Yek86MrkVw "Neutral Density" unedited but cropped