I try to get clear photos without moving anything, which sometimes means deleting a lot of photos auto-focused on the wrong thing. Except for mushrooms, of course. But I make fewer research-grade mushroom observations than if I felt less guilty disturbing them.
My fingers make guest appearances holding grass out of the way or tilting flower heads.
When I do move stuff, I try to take a before shot.
I do crop photo to remove clutter/possible confusion. But I don’t do any other photo manipulation.
I do whatever I need to, within reason but broad reason, to get the photo I want, for ID purposes. Nothing “beautiful” about my photos - I merely want them for an ID.
I consider myself part of nature, and it’s in my nature to interact with nature, which includes moving things around, or hosting them on my body… every other jumping spider I try to photograph jumps onto me, or onto my camera. So I simply let them walk on my hand while I photograph them.
I also capture/tag/release live birds as part of my job, which is pretty disruptive to the bird. With that for context, it’s no surprise that I’m fine with moving a few sticks, dead leaves, or letting insects crawl around on me to get some decent photos. A deer walking around the forest moves a lot of leaves and sticks… I’m just another one like it.
Birds and mammals and insects - rarely because they move around and don’;t pose for the camera.
Plants - quite frequently because the point of the photo of a plant for me is either artistic (not relevant here) or for ID purposes and particularly in the latter case you often need to do some tidying up so that you can get a good image of a particular field mark important for species ID.
Sometimes the most important “grooming” any of us can do with our photos is to crop them. I rarely get a subject framed properly, so I do this a lot, but that’s mainly for my own aesthetic sense of what it should look like. But if it’s hard to find your subject in the photo, cropping is probably a good idea.
Other post-photo “grooming” can include editing to adjust color, shadows, brightness, sharpness, etc. which can improve its identifiability.
I know many say all that is unnecessary and that they’re not trying to create a beautiful image, but if the subject is clearer and more “aesthetic” you might get more identifiers to look at it.
I’d say from my own perspective I’ve probably only groomed single-digit numbers of my thousands of observations, where I intentionally moved things out of the way for aesthetic.
There are a few things I do all the time that might be considered grooming; I always crop photos, use my hands a lot to isolate the subject and/or help focus (my cell phone camera doesn’t have focus lock 
), and if something is obscuring a useful identifying feature I will move it out of the way.
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