I've outgrown it, personally. For that "natural" perspective, 35mm is still wide enough to shoot a scene "the way you see it", but it can still be surprisingly

I've outgrown it, personally. For that "natural" perspective, 35mm is still wide enough to shoot a scene "the way you see it", but it can still be surprisingly intimate. And for the "portrait" thing, anything 70-100mm is a sweet spot. 50mm is trying to split the difference between both scenarios but doesn't really achieve either. So personally, I'm more likely to carry a 35+85 duo. Or in fact, a 50mm f/1.8 on an APS-C crop camera along with my smartphone. Or, a smartphone with a portrait lens. I just zoom in from the default 24mm a lot of times, that's it. From a tech point of view, 50mm is the easiest lens to build. That's why they used to be on everything. Not because they're useful. A symmetric double gauss setup with six lenses is kinda straightforward and it works okay, it even becomes excellent once stopped down. Sharp 35mm lenses that are also fast can only be built with aspherical lenses, so traditionally it wasn't really possible to build fast ones that are also good. Recent ones are excellent, but as always, many photographers refuse to go with the times, and they'll repeat decade old advice. (TL;DR: Smartphones do a lot of things right, and their evolution was backed by data. They first went from 28mm to 24mm, added 16mm second, then added 75mm third, and only then did they add 48mm as a 2x zoom into the 24mm camera. It's neat, but not essential.)