I fully agree with all that. I was photo editor of my undergrad paper back in the day and just the mechanics of shooting film, developing it, printing it required quite a bit of knowledge just to get to output that was reasonably competent technically.
Of course, go back pre-35mm and that was even more the case but--as you say--even just a phone takes precent decent pictures for at least certain types of shots if you even halfway know what you're doing. I have tons of equipment and even I just default to my iPhone a lot of the time for casual "memory" type shots.
The sheer quantity of shots changes everything. Back in the day of film, a pro could burn a roll of film for a single usable shot (maybe). An amateur had development and printing combined (expensive) and had to make every shot count, leading to most shots being of a staged and unnatural variety.
For B&W, it actually wasn't quite that bad with 35mm relative to today. For something like a football game, I might have shot 5 rolls (so 200 frames or so). Random assignments for a given day a roll or two. You made contact prints and printed up what was needed.
Definitely a bigger consideration than today but it's not all about quantity.
Seems to me that if you want to "be special/be paid/be known" in your art form, you need to pick the ones that are enjoyable to you AND have a significant moat, or barrier to entry. e.g. making complex pieces of music, assuming you're not stitching together prefabs from Splice, is actually much harder than pulling your phone out. Same thing with shooting, color grading, and cutting a great video, that's MUCH harder than shooting a frame and applying a filter. Same with doing a beautiful sketch or painting, that takes years of practice.
Photo cameras used to be moats a long time ago, when they were bulky, expensive, a novelty, and the development of film was not as straightforward. But now, it's gotten 100% democratized.