No cameraphile uses on-camera software to.. do anything. That you can do better on a computer than a phone then goes without saying.

I'm not going to carry it everywhere no, nor did I say that. (Actually I didn't even say it applied to me.) I carry my Panasonic TZ100 when on holiday or otherwise desirous of better-than-phone photos. It fits in my pocket. Not the same one as my phone granted, but nonetheless in a pocket while in a case and straddling a spare battery.

There are audiophiles and audiophiles. A good chunk of them will laugh at Monster cables et al. as much as any of us.

You can appreciate a better DAC than found in most/all phones without descending into gold-plated USB-C charging cables that maintain optimal audio nonsense.

And even that assuming playback of some locally stored file. I'm not sure any of the mainstream streaming Services offer a format/bitrate that it's not possible objectively to do better than.

I’ve scoured the internet and I can’t find any study that shows people can reliably tell the the difference between 256Kb AAC and lossless.

You can produce anything you want out of lossless file. Other way around? Not so much

That’s true. But that still doesn’t mean that these “audiophiles” aren’t full of themselves

Hear hear

For the purpose of this discussion it doesn't matter - the germane point is that some people will want a 'better' system regardless of whether your studies agree it is significantly/detectably so.