Exactly. And heavy post-processing is necessary for even very simple things because a camera's sensors don't match the output picture all that well. See for exa

Exactly. And heavy post-processing is necessary for even very simple things because a camera's sensors don't match the output picture all that well. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter#Demosaicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter#Demosaicing. The postprocessing has moved up the semantic stack and now cameras do things like face detection and smoothing, but there's always been some amount of postprocessing in digital photography.