Regarding the focal length difference, which is very well illustrated by the first two photographs, I would frame this point differently from what the article does.

Disclaimer: I don't have an iPhone 16, but my Poco X4 Pro 5G suffers from the same "fisheye" issue with its 25mm-equivalent lens. And I am not a professional photographer.

It is not a "bad camera" issue, but a composition issue forced by the short focal length second and the users' aversion to cropping the image first. You can easily avoid this issue by shooting at 2x digital zoom (or cropping) and going 2x further from the scene. And 2x zoom (with the corresponding decrease in the resolution of the resulting files) is how I shoot the majority of my photos.

So yes, I effectively have a 3MP camera, not 12MP (and not the hyper-marketed 108MP AI camera), and, for many purposes, it's still good enough.

P.S. Composition matters a lot. The right photo has the right proportions between the players and the trees in the background. The inclusion of the yellow golf flag in the "beginner photographer's" photo is also what makes the scene more complete artistically and worth hanging on the wall.

Focal length wouldn't even be an issue if the photographer was taking the photos from the same position. The fish-eye effect is literally because the photographer is closer. Cropping a photo with a different focal length will give the same composition and difference will be the distortion introduced by the camera and the image processing.