"Shot on DSLR" films are also like this. There's a camera body in there somewhere, and $100k worth of junk hanging off it in every direction, and the focus is being operated remotely by a guy with a 30" display.
The situation isn't the same because anyone buying a DSLR with swappable lenses should understand that they're buying the body and not the lenses. It's fair game to use the best possible lens in that situation because then the camera body capabilities are the limiting factor in the test.
When you buy an iPhone for photography and video, you're buying the sensor, lenses, shutter, focusing system, and onboard image processing in a single package. Changing that package by using an aerial image from a different lens is a material change in the system because whole chunks of the iPhone image system are no longer doing the work.
The Creator was pretty awesome. Sony FX3, a $300 Kowa 75mm anamorphic, a Ninja monitor/recorder ($800?), a Ronin RS2 stabilizer arm ($300). Plus some cheese plates, batteries, audio interface. But the $3k camera was probably the bulk of their cost for the rig. https://www.visuals.co.uk/blog/news-ep358/
Theres been a ton of press about this, because, yeah, it is hella rare. And yeah usually there's some dude pulling focus on a $20k+ monitor (the brightness these things need to work in even shaded daylight is absurd).
I think it's worth assessing what impacts the look and feel versus what is for production sake; there's a lot of ways to spend more but more to help production than to affect look. A talented camera operator probably could hold focus themselves on many scenes without the focus operator (especially with modern autofocus) and get similar output. But if you're making a $100m+ movie, heck yeah you rent gear & hire the focus puller, way less risk (although the autofocus probably is more precise & reliable in many ways now!), way less need to make sure you pick the right expert operator. Ditto for a lot of this stuff; just rent the most badass stabilizers and camera mounts, for that little extra edge of stability. Having good/expensive synced time-codes, having better position tracking; they speed production, not necessarily super improve it's output.
It's pretty awesome seeing the Netflix approved pipelines keep getting more in reach. There's really good options now. Even a $1000 lens can be super impressive. There's really good budget cine lens sets now. But yeah the rest of production stuff is never cheap. Lighting is the key thing that keeps coming to mind for me, where light budget can easily get to camera budget and then some, and boy does that make a huge difference; improve the output of the scene that your camera is set to input.
