I lived plenty of my life prior to the cell phone era (born early 80s).

I do not have the same feeling you seem to have about photos from this era. Some are fine, sure, but looking back on them, most of them are very bad photos and most do not capture anything close to what I'd call an emotional feeling.

I would go so far as to say 99% of the photos from my life prior to 2000s really suck, like really badly. Some also degrade visually and lose their impact over time.

Since you couldn't be sure what you caught more than often what is captured is poorly framed, blurry, weird, poorly timed, and often left out a lot of stuff that was actually going on. You also had to try and be super selective because each photograph had a real tangible cost.

Conversely, I find being able to take many photos in quick succession and across a long period of time at a very high clarity allows me to select a photo that most closely matches my feeling in those moments at that event.

Even more so with AI photos. Although many models cannot do this well, their abilities get better each day and can allow you to compose or edit/modify a photo in such a way that matches your internal feelings rather than the blandness of what is essentially a random photo of random stuff that may or may not convey an emotion anywhere near to what I was feeling or remember feeling in that moment.