I still love my "real" cameras, but like basically all other photographers, I consider my phone a very convenient go-to-alternative
When picture phones were new, their cameras were genrally miserable, and more like a novice technical gimmick added to a phone, which had the primary task of handling phone calls. The use for the images shot on a phone were limited, and the quality of the pictures wasn't exactly great.
Today's phones are something very different from the first generations of cell phones, and calling them phones might even be wrong, because even though you can use them to call people and talk to them, most of people's phone time isn't actually used doing phone calls.
Modern phones are much more than phones.
For most people the phone is the hub in their digital life. For my generation (born in the 50's and 60's), the computer was the tool we used - and many still use - to interact with the digital realm, the Internet and things like email.
Most younger generations have a very different relation to their computer - if they even have one. The notebook (which it is in probably 80% of the cases) is something used in connection with work or school, and if there's a desktop computer in the household, it's very likely used for gaming.
Communication, surfing, images, music and much more is mainly handled on the phone. This of course means that most images are shot using the phone. Very few people use an actual camera to take pictures, and "real" cameras are mostly used by enthusiasts and professionals.
Even elderly people will use the phone as their primary camera. My mother is in her late 80's, and she shoots all her pictures on the phone. She also uses the phone (and the cloud) as her photo album, and uses the phone to display them too. We have a couple of neighbors in their 70's and the same is the case for them.
I have shot thousands of pictures on my mobile phones, particularly after I got the first one with a somewhat decent camera, which in my case was an HTC phone.
Since then I've had other brands of phones, and the latest - a Huawei and currently a Google Pixel - have cameras, which are actually really good, as good as any P&S camera I have owned.
The Pixel has a high resolution with a pretty good image quality, it has good optics considering the size, and has some nice facilities including the ability to shoot raw and a real, optical wide angle, which delivers some very useful results.
The outcome is that I often use the phone as my go-to-camera, when I need an image for documentation of as a "fill-in-image" for some project or image series shot with an SLR. The convenience of having it right there in the pocket, and the fact that it immediately uploads the images - jpg's and raw's - to an online repository, makes it extremely fast and easy to use for a quick illustration for an article or to use to share with friends or family. I still import the images into Lightroom and often work on them like any other pictures, but I also sometimes just use the phone directly to handle the images, editing, sending, uploading.
