Modern smartphones perform very admirably in low light, but with some undesirable (IMO) tradeoffs: you get all kinds of weird artifacts from extrapolation, and the overall image frequently looks muddy compared to a low-light capture on a DSLR or mirrorless camera (which tend to look noisy instead). I do, however, regularly make those tradeoffs when I don't want to bug people with a flash or haul a full camera body to a show, though!

I think my use of flash indoors amounts to an aesthetic preference: I like the way skin tones come out on the combination of a ludicrous P&S flash and a "cheap" color stock like Gold 200. The tradeoff is glare and red-eye, both of which can be compensated for during compensation or with editing after the fact.

You can get very good results by turning the flash power down a few notches and pointing it at the ceiling.

For built-flashes that can’t be aimed I usually hold a white sheet of paper just in front of it.

The flash of P&S Film cameras have their own look that people like and are often associated with a "party aesthetic."

Using flash on color negative film is a very different experience from digital. Xenon flashes do really well with film, and don't blow out highlights like digital, giving a smooth rolloff that's very pleasing to the eye.

> modern smartphones are great in low light.

This is only true if you only view images on a smartphone. Blow them up on a 23 inch or larger monitor and you'll notice tons of digital NR, artifacting, and other fuckery where the image processing algorithms have tried to recover detail and not really done so all that well.

That's mostly to do with the direction of the light from the flash and how bright it.

For example if you can make use of a bounce flash you can get a lovely soft fill light.

Light coming from very close to the axis of the lens as the dominant light source is going to make your scene look very flat.

It works well for a day light fill a few stops down but generally looks a bit crap as the only light.

If the ceilings are white and not too high, aim the flash to bounce off of the ceiling; that looks way better.