Except it seems to be going in the opposite direction, every phone I've upgraded (various Androids and iPhones) seemed to have more smoothing than the one I'd had before. My iPhone 16 night photos look like borderline generative AI and there's no way to turn that off!
I was honestly happier with the technically inferior iPhone 5 camera, the photos at least didn't look fake.
If you can get raw image data from the sensor, then there will be apps to produce images without AI processing. Ordinary people love AI enhancements, so built-in apps are optimised for this approach, but as long as underlying data is accessible, there will be third-party apps that you can use.
That's a big IF. There's ProRaw but for that you need an iPhone Pro, some Androids have RAW too but it's huge and lacks even the most basic processing resulting in photos that look like one of the non-final steps in the post.
Third party apps are hit or miss, you pay for one only to figure out it doesn't actually get the raw output on your model and so on.
There's very little excuse for phone manufacturers to not put a toggle to disable excessive post-processing. Even iOS had an HDR toggle but they've removed it since.
I was honestly happier with the technically inferior iPhone 5 camera, the photos at least didn't look fake.