The only reason I buy nicer phones is for the camera. My kids are getting older and I'm not taking 100 photos a day anymore so when my iPhone 12 Pro is retired I'll likely get whatever iPhone SE is current and call it a day. Hopefully by then they'll have FaceID and a full coverage screen like every other iPhone. But hopefully no dynamic island. I can't stand that gimmick.

My folks both have an SE (a 2 and a 3), and the photos are much better than you'd expect for a $400 phone. I've used them and they're plenty fast, it's really only the tiny screen that would give me pause.

If ~$400 can get you 5-6 years out of a phone that's a steal.

The camera is the thing that had me wanting the updates for a number of years, the year to year improvements were significant for all phones, but I feel we've had 5+ years of the high end phone cameras being basically "good enough" and so now that the year to year improvements just aren't worth it.

I'm sure that's not true for professional photographers, but I assume that they use real cameras when the photo quality actually matters anyway?