>On my Sony phone I can take a photo, press the "share" button to get a context based share menu and my most recent signal/email contacts appear right at the top ready to send without leaving the camera app at all. If I want to send it to someone not on that list I have to get into another screen but not two.

You can do that on the iPhone too. What the person you're replying to is talking about is if you're already in messages, the interface for pulling a photo in is now an extra step over what it was before.