Have you ever used a 35mm film camera? I’ve taken loads of photos on 35mm film because I enjoy the process, but the technical quality in terms of resolution and dynamic range is clearly inferior to that of a modern cell phone camera - even if you are using very high qualify scans or wet printing. And the difference in color accuracy is even more stark.

The amount of light that’s let in depends entirely on the aperture diameter, not the size of the sensor. Sometimes you can use a larger diameter on a 35mm camera if you don’t need a lot of depth of field; but equally, modern digital sensors are usable at ISOs where film is not. The acid test here is night photography. If you want to take night portraits, you're going to have a far better time of it using a modern cell phone than a 35mm SLR with, say, an f1.8 lens. Even with a wide aperture lens and 400 ISO film, you'd be lucky to get a shutter speed faster than 1/15th of a second.

You can of course get more resolution with a larger format (I enjoy 4x5 myself). However, using medium or large format film cameras is a massive step down in terms of practicality and rules out entire genres of photography that phones excel at. I enjoy lugging my 4x5 film camera around and I very occasionally I get a nice photo out of it. Even when I do, the version I take on my phone is inferior in terms of resolution (not actually that important) but better in every other respect. You can drive yourself insane trying to get a 4x5 negative that doesn't have any uneven development or scratches.

The bottom line is that a modern cell phone is a vastly superior general purpose photographic tool to anything that was available in the 1990s. We all (in rich parts of the world) have access to cameras that professional photographers would have killed for a few decades ago. Thus, it annoys me when people compare these incredible devices unfavourably with "real cameras". It's pure gatekeeping.