The layperson also doesn't really consider the result of their smartphone app to be "processed", until they get slapped in the face with it. The layperson's intuition isn't reliable.

The layperson doesn’t have any idea what they are talking about so it’s hard to pull a coherent statement out of it.

People claim they want unprocessed photos but it’s not clear what they even mean by that. I think we can rule things like ai replacing the sun with a moon as obviously too far, but most phones like the iPhone aren’t AI generating or filtering things.

Someone manually selecting an exposure, white balance, and tint in Lightroom isn’t any less real than letting the camera do that automatically because the camera doesn’t know which values are real either.