I think the processing is getting worse. I look at photos I took with my Nexus 6P and they look much nicer than my Pixel 7/9Pro photos. At some point everybody decided that the most important thing about photos is preserving as much dynamic range and having no noise. This makes the photos look fake and unpleasant.

Yeah agree with that. I’ve got a backup pixel 7A. That does some horrible things to photos.