I don't know about this - RAW files are recordings of sensor values. Those sensor values are accurate of what light the sensor measured.

Then the sensor values are converted to a JPEG. So it's still an accurate rendition of the light - even though yes, it is a rendition of the light.

But to completely replace some sensor values with some computer-generated values is a different ballgame, IMO. It's more akin to Photoshop editing, as opposed to Lightroom.

This is really splitting hairs, but even our eyes are interpretation of reality.

The camera sensor does not record the wavelengths of lights it is capturing, only RGB values. We can only reproduce the picture in a way that is convincing to our eyes, not what light what original being captured.

Yes, but still, as another poster put it, it's the difference of changing the lighting versus changing the texture pack...

The least that modern phone cameras do is to blend multiple RAW files into a single picture, to improve various metrics. That brings the risk of producing results like the one seen here.

I agree with your point, but just to be clear for people:

When you bring that RAW photo into something like Lightroom or Capture One they’re automatically applying a base curve to the photo before you do anything.

In Capture One you can set that to “flat” which I believe is fairly unprocessed, and it takes a lot of work to get it to a usable state from there. They also have other options, and they recently changed their default setting and it’s pretty incredible how different it is from their old default.

There definitely though is some magic-sauce when de-Bayering [1] the RAW data and then playing games with color spaces and color profiles to end up with that final JPEG.

I agree with your point though. I dislike "computational photography".

[1] guess it is called demosaicing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing

There is a difference between getting the colors subjectively wrong and replacing the entire texture of the material

Black and white photo of my grandma is a bit different from a color photo of somebodys else grandma

They surely are. But not all interpretations are alike. I was recenty looking at (scans of) analog pictures I took years ago using an entry level analog camera and apart from white balance being off, the general skin tone + texture and shadows at least looks very realistic and not like some cardboard version of skin.

I agree - it is getting harder and harder to fully turn off skin smoothing on cellphones and webcam software. You can turn it down, but rarely off.