It’s the same for me. I have a quite cheap portrait lens for my old Sony Nex-3, and the pictures I get out of it are (subjectively) so much better than those taken with my iPhone XS, with actual bokeh and real depth.

I mean, can anything really ever be objective? Or are things just continually witnessed, from tens - to trillions - of times?

I would say if you perform a double blind study with a decent sample size, you will indeed reach objective conclusions, and you will even know the probability that your observation is correct.

Right, but the parent's point was specifically that pictures taken on phones don't look good in large size....and all I'm saying is that yes, they do sometimes. Obviously had this been in the dark, the result would be abysmal. But in conditions like the ones in the picture? The print is completely ok in my(non-professional) opinion.

Better gear = a wider range of “sometimes”