Are there meaningful benefits from using Halide for people who don't want to shoot RAW or manipulate their photos in Lightroom? Articles like e.g. https://fstoppers.com/apps/why-you-shouldnt-waste-money-came... say I shouldn't bother.
Halide developer here. Since we're in the middle of a launch, I don't have time to dig super detailed into that article you posted, but from a quick skim it doesn't appear to be particularly well-researched. All the goodness of the first party camera's deep fusion, etc, is exposed to third-party developers. So if you're using a third party app (that knows what they're doing) then at worst you get the same results as…
MkI was the absolute best tool to do that one thing. Respectfully, MkII compromises on manual control to an unacceptable degree for my usage and an investment in education for beginners along with dumbing down the UI with explicit text labels (the font is indeed nice, but why do things with clean and clear iconography need these additional labels?) is not what I'd consider part of "that one thing". Of course, these issues could be fixed in the future, at which point I'd gladly eat my words.