I think you’ll find that there is no clear line between what you call fake bullshit and the rest of the process. The entire signal path is optimized at every step to reduce and suppress noise. There’s actual light noise, there’s readout noise, ADC noise, often dozens or hundreds of abnormal pixels. Certain autofocus technologies even sacrifice image-producing pixels, and simply interpolate over the “holes” in data.

Regarding sharpening and optical stuff, many modern camera lenses are built with the expectation that some of their optical properties will be easy to correct for in software, allowing the manufacturer to optimize for other properties.