I don't think it's the same, for me personally I don't like heavily processed images. But not in the sense that they need processing to look decent or to convey the perception of what it was like in real life, more in the sense that the edits change the reality in a significant way so it affects the mood and the experience. For example, you take a photo on a drab cloudy day, but then edit the white balance to make it seem like golden hour, or brighten a part to make it seems like a ray of light was hitting that spot. Adjusting the exposure, touching up slightly, that's all fine, depending on what you are trying to achieve of course. But what I see on instagram or shorts these days is people comparing their raws and edited photos, and without the edits the composition and subject would be just mediocre and uninteresting.

The “raw” and unedited photo can be just as or even more unrealistic than the edited one though.

Photographs can drop a lot of the perspective, feeling and colour you experience when you’re there. When you take a picture of a slope on a mountain for example (on a ski piste for example), it always looks much less impressive and steep on a phone camera. Same with colours. You can be watching an amazing scene in the mountains, but when you take a photo with most cameras, the colours are more dull, and it just looks flatter. If a filter enhances it and makes it feel as vibrant as the real life view, I’d argue you are making it more realistic.

The main message I get from OP’s post is precisely that there is no “real unfiltered / unedited image”, you’re always imperfectly capturing something your eyes see, but with a different balance of colours, different detector sensitivity to a real eye etc… and some degree of postprocessing is always required make it match what you see in real life.

This is nothing new. For example, Ansel Adams’s famous Moonrise, Hernandez photo required extensive darkroom manipulations to achieve the intended effect:

https://www.winecountry.camera/blog/2021/11/1/moonrise-80-ye...

Most great photos have mediocre and uninteresting subjects. It’s all in the decisions the photographer makes about how to render the final image.