I’m afraid there are multiple misunderstandings in your logic here. First and foremost is the reliance on a phone camera to get a proper date/time stamp. A recently identified glitch on Samsung phone cameras has lead to many thousands of erroneous date/time stamps on uploaded images from those products:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/possible-date-time-unix-epoch-issue-with-samsung-phones/17453
So relying on a phone date/time stamp still has potential glitches. I’m in the midst of some detailed research on Lepidoptera sightings in Texas uploaded to iNat, including the historical timeline of such uploads, and these erroneous date/time stamps are rendering thousands of observations worthless until/unless the dates are corrected–a huge headache.
Secondly, for one of my particular areas of interest, moths, phone cameras are still not sufficient to document any critter with a wingspan smaller than about an inch (perhaps 80% of all moths) and don’t provide enough detail to distinguish closely similar species. You’re correct that phone cameras have improved vastly, but they still aren’t a substitute for an SLR or even a good little point-and-shoot camera for fine details needed to identify many plants and insects. My $200 point-and-shoot Canon still outperforms the best phone cameras for tiny subjects.