This whole post read like and in-depth response to people that claim things like “I don’t do any processing to my photos” or feel some kind of purist shame about doing so. It’s a weird chip some amateur photographers have on their shoulders, but even pros “process” their photos and have done so all the way back until the beginning of photography.
Is it fair to recognize that there is a category difference between the processing that happens by default on every cell phone camera today, and the time and labor intensive processing performed by professionals in the time of film? What's happening today is like if you took your film to a developer and then the negatives came back with someone having airbrushed out the wrinkles and evened out skin tones. I think that photographers back in the day would have made a point of saying "hey, I didn't take my film to a lab where an artist goes in and changes stuff."
It’s fair to recognize. Personally I do not like the aesthetic decisions that Apple makes, so if I’m taking pictures on my phone I use camera apps that’s give me more control (Halide, Leica Lux). I also have reservations about cloning away power lines or using AI in-painting. But to your example, if you got your film scanned or printed, in all likelihood someone did go in and change some stuff. Color correction and touching the contrast etc is routine at development labs. There is no tenable purist stance because there is no “traditional” amount of processing.
Some things are just so far outside the bounds of normal, and yet are still world-class photography. Just look at someone like Antoine d’Agata who shot an entire book using an iPhone accessory FLIR camera.
I would argue that there's a qualitative difference between processing that aims to get the image to the point where it's a closer rendition of how the human eye would have perceived the subject (the stuff described in TFA) vs processing that explicitly tries to make the image further from the in-person experience (removing power lines, people from the background, etc)
