Yes, it’s still far from great.
However, when I got the phone last July, I use a gcam port to record scenes at a kid’s summer camp. People singing at a campfire. You couldn’t even hear anything except for a very compressed muddy mess at a very low level. Complete garbage. And not just with gcam, same when taking a video on signal (back when the camera worked in signal which is another issue) or making insta stories - you couldn’t even hear me talking to the camera.
For these use cases it’s now actually usable. Not perfect, but usable. I highly doubt we will ever get production level audio from a smartphone, and I personally don’t expect it.