Generally, people don't care if the phone uses expensive 5x lens or not. I don't really know who does. :) They are at some position and want to quickly take a picture - phone refusing to take a photo or taking an out of focus one would be terrible for them and cause outrage. Image Quality is somewhat important, but 1000x less important than capturing the right moment. If you miss the moment - it's gone forever.
I worked as a researcher at the Google HDR+ team, developing algorithms for Pixel 2/3/4/5/6 camera. And consistently we would get both user studies/bugs/feedback, as well as guidance from PMs that responsiveness/latency and "taking any usable photo at all as fast as possible" was more important than the Image Quality. I'll admit, we didn't always deliver and often compromised (doing in software what everyone else was doing in hardware back then is HARD), but this principle blocked some cool IQ improvements from launching - and I think was the right call, even if some of those were mine (like high quality multi frame super res in every photo).