Horrible RAW photos from iPhone 14 Plus

There's either something really wrong with macOS RAW processing nowadays or with my new iPhone 14 Plus RAW engine. I use several third party apps (Filmic Firstlight, Halide, ProCamera, ProCam) and they've all delivered fine results before, whether I've opened / processed the RAWs in Photos, Affinity Photo, Photoscape X, Darktable or RawTherapee. I've used many iPhones from 7 all the way to this 14 Plus. I also had 13 Pro Max previously and RAW was working great. There never were real surprises when I viewed the RAW after taking. To be stressed, I never open / edit them in iPhone after taking but import them to Mac.

There are many subjects I photograph but the most important are photos of my oilpaintings, and I need those for my online gallery and social media platforms.

When I take the RAW on iPhone 14 Plus the preview shows it properly, no reasons to worry. However, opened in Photos or any of the mentioned apps the images are awfull: highlights washed out beyond rescue, often even blacks are crushed, sometimes colors are completely off and behave strangely when adjusting. RAW editing is completely useless, it's like trying to alter a severely blown out JPG... I can't even check whether the terrible oversharpening issue plagues RAW files as well as JPG and Heic.

I hope this looks better than on my preview here... But the point is, the iPhone 7 RAW was taken before buying 14 Plus and before Ventura and the image reflects the original painting nicely. I just wanted to test whether I'd get an even better image with the 14 Plus. Even the iPhone 7's image is unnaturally sharp and shows the canvas grain and color gradations too crudely but I can live with that until I get a dedicated DSLR.

Makes me angry as I paid 1100 euros to get better images than from my work phone, iPhone 7. But as you can see from the samples above, it's quite contrary. I included a comparison of shots with iPhone 14 Plus Heic and iPhone 7 edited RAW. The latter, in this case, is a bit soft, as there seems to have happened some change in the RAW processing pipeline of Ventura—a RAW of this painting came out sharper when I shot it before buying the 14 Plus. Now the unprocessed RAW was kind of greyish and unsharp which would suggest to me that macOS applied a different RAW processing routine to all RAWs after it noticed the new 14 Plus. Anyone had similar findings / thoughts?

I still prefer the iPhone 7 RAWs to the 14 Plus' Heic files although the dynamic range and color representation are not that bad. The problem is the horrible oversharpening: my painting looks like a can of worms! The surface is not smooth, for sure, and there are slight "ridges" from the gesso but nothing like this. It's what people are complaining about Apple's latest image processing choices. I've seen face shots of my friends with pores looking like craters and wrinkles like rivers, taken on expensive iPhones. As a long time user of Apple products—Macs from 1988 Mac Plus and iPhones since iPhone 3—this is sad... The complaints have been there for years already but Apple doesn't seem to care (?). They have their "vision" of unnatural looking photos and we users should just stop complaining. I didn't mind as long as I had my freedom with RAW format but this is going insane if I can't control even that anymore.

Between, I still love iPhone video quality and like ios way more than Android. Also otherwise I think 14 Plus is a very satisfactory phone. But please, fix the RAW issue at least!

(Sorry for such long post and thanks for any real answers that don't fall under category of "learn how to take better photos".)