> Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene.

This is a non sequitur. Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference. Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for the same concerns quoted:

  The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you 
  towards understanding what you actually want to make, 
  whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning.

Photography’s rapid commercialisation [21] meant that many painters – or prospective painters – were tempted to take up photography instead of, or in addition to, their painting careers. Most of these new photographers produced portraits. As these were far cheaper and easier to produce than painted portraits, portraits ceased to be the privilege of the well-off and, in a sense, became democratised [22].

Some commentators dismissed this trend towards photography as simply a beneficial weeding out of second-raters. For example, the writer Louis Figuier commented that photography did art a service by putting mediocre artists out of business, for their only goal was exact imitation. Similarly, Baudelaire described photography as the “refuge of failed painters with too little talent”. In his view, art was derived from imagination, judgment and feeling but photography was mere reproduction which cheapened the products of the beautiful [23].

https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html#:~:te...

Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference.

You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day.

Guess what, they got over it. You will too.