[sublinear]

That's way off base.

There's a very significant chunk of people who rarely if ever use the camera on their phone right now. It's not even a matter of who they are or their personal opinions. Cameras simply aren't an exclusive gateway to anything critically important. In many cases a photo or video is an objectively worse format than text.

Smartphones became common because they are now the only way to access certain information or authenticate. It's to the extent that we eliminated hard copy documents and changed publishing and proving identity irreversibly. People frequently use smartphones because they have to, and a smartphone without a working camera is still perfectly usable and always will be.

This isn't a matter of the public being wooed by a sales pitch or wanting anything in particular. Images require less accessible and reliable methods of interpretation to convey information whereas text is the information. If you're not convinced then consider that both can be generated by AI. A generated image can be convincing and so can generated text, yet we depend on special forms of text such as keys which cannot be generated by AI and any image trying to encode the same is always inferior. An image is never acceptable as a sole or even primary means of authentication. For all these reasons and more, an image is never the only format available.

[sprinkly-dust]

I would disagree that a smartphone without a working camera is perfectly usable. A lot of the world — especially in developing countries — runs on QR Codes for everything from restaurant menus to electronic payments. Without a camera, other stuff too, like KYC, just doesn't work. These are the sorts of changes that, as you mentioned, are forcing people to use smartphones. And they rely on the camera.

[sublinear]

QR codes can be unreliable and unnecessary to convey a URL. That's why I said "an image is never the only format available". If it's a deliberate thing people must pay attention to, the friction is already too high.

Most QR codes are not permalinks. Nobody wants to print out another one or retry scanning with better lighting only to find it doesn't work. When it really matters the link is dynamic and invisible. It's baked into a script your phone runs when you perform a more interesting higher level task in an app, tap-to-pay when you arrive, etc.