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.
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.
I agree with your point though. I dislike "computational photography".
[1] guess it is called demosaicing
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.