I think a camera is an excellent tool for producing photographs. It is a shitty tool for becoming a better painter.
If all you wanted was a reasonable facsimile of a family member, then photography made attaining that object dramatically cheaper. Prior to photography, almost all of images of people are of fabulously wealthy and powerful people because they were the only ones who could afford a skilled painter making their portrait. After photography, most people could afford a daguerreotype.
The impact on fine art is much more complex. I think probably all you can say definitively is that the timeline where photography exists produces very different fine art paintings because the incentive structure and the implications are different in a world with photos. But better or worse? Impossible to say.
Yet vibe coders and people that delegate the creation of software through English prose to an LLM are still called software engineers or programmers. That is my major problem with the whole thing.
I think comes from a natural feeling of ownership over your profession. There's nothing wrong with that feeling that the title of engineer must be earned but in reality titles means nothing, what you do with it is whats important.