From what I've read just now Halide should be able to – they offer "ProRAW" and "RAW", so there has to be a difference in… rawness :D

For Lightroom I just found complaints from September and October of last year and a standard "we're working on it". Don't know what's the situation now.

I don't think not processing is an option – after all, we are talking about Apple. If they deem something good (enough?) there is a chance it will become the default without any toggle.

I can't disable the "Smart" HDR function in my 13 mini. Only way around it is using the Lightroom camera (or any other third party camera app, I suppose). That also has the nice advantage of keeping noise reduction and sharpening to a minimum, which makes them my problem to consider afterwards. I also like noisy but sharp pictures better than the clean, oversharpened "smartly" optimized mess that has become normal.

Maybe try that? Lightroom saves DNG files (at least on my 13 mini, which doesn't offer RAW files otherwise). Maybe it gets the sensor data before any "smart" processing can take place.

As I said, your images are very difficult edge cases. I think even my mirrorless camera would have to ramp up the ISO to unuseable heights for this scene.

The phone has an easier time processing the 12 MP version because it can combine the information of a four pixel square into one single pixel. But even then these tiny pixels can't gather enough photons to produce a clear image.

Something fancy like Night Mode would have helped here. Longer exposure means more light means lower ISO (sensor sensitivity) means less noise.

The iPhone will apply image processing (including noise reduction and its "Smart HDR" and "Deep Fusion" stuff) to the pure sensor data: About Apple ProRAW – obviously to a lesser extent and not as aggressively as for JPEGs.

But in edge cases like yours it's still a mess. That's why the middle of the speaker mesh is still visible. There was despite all the noise enough information to be worth keeping, while on the sides the mesh structure got so small that it was overwhelmed by noise and therefore reduced to… blobs.

Somewhere in this process the phone somehow does something that results in grid-like structures.

It's physics, followed by engineering. All we can do is to understand the principles and act accordingly. And maybe consider the Pro in ProRAW to mean "Processed" instead of "Professional" :D

Size and OS updates.

I wanted a compact form factor phone (similar to my Sony Xperia X Compact and the phones before) from a reputable manufacturer with at least three to four years of software support.

Turned out my only options were the iPhone 12 mini and the iPhone 13 mini.

With Android I would have had to go at least five years back to phones which were already two major versions behind and out of support.