This article is mediocre because smartphone is perfectly happy to take pictures that look like the "beginner photographer" pictures. You just have to know what you're doing.

- Don't use the super wide lens and stand too close to people

- Use the super easy edit features to fix distortion

- Pay attention to lighting & exposure

- Don't just accept the iPhones default settings

If you want toned down contrast and color smartphones are perfectly happy to do that.

Otherwise.. I do configure my fancy digital camera to capture reduced contrast and color saturation compared to the defaults on a smartphone. So a lot of the time my samples would look like his.

Average people want contrast + saturation turned up like crazy. This is why the defaults ship that way. This is why a lot of the beginner non-phone digital cameras often shipped with the defaults that way. This is why TVs ship with the brightness/contrast/saturation boosted. The average person might look at your more subtle photo and appreciate it as better than theirs but then they will go right back to being super happy with their high contrast/saturation images.