Probably cause Big Tech stole all the computer vision and DSP folks

The question of GP wasn't that, but why you can't buy "iPhone image processing pipeline to UVC/USB".

I think we agree but you don’t understand me.

there are cameras that do this; there are many UVC USB3 webcams with phone-grade sensors (medium quality).

“This” refers to the contribution of software processing described above, i.e. explicitly not the matter of sensor quality.

oh, that's for economic reasons. The industrial and desktop consumer computer vision markets are orders of magnitude smaller and their development cycle times orders of magnitude longer.

I looked into this a while ago- trying to use gcam technology for scientific imaging- when I worked at Google, and there was zero interest from those teams. They were 100% focused on next-gen camera tech (and it showed- that was the period when phones got unbelievably good at taking high quality images using computational photography).