The truth is slightly more murky: There's an element of engineering improvements that have brought us much closer to the physical limits between, say, my origin

The truth is slightly more murky: There's an element of engineering improvements that have brought us much closer to the physical limits between, say, my original Motorola Razr flip phone and the modern incarnation. But yes, the manufacturers are now squeezing the last few percent out of the diffraction limit rather than leaving most of it on the table, so the year-by-year leaps and bounds in camera quality are mostly coming from AI enhancement not optics or sensors.