As an analogy, you can try taking a selfie using an old laptop’s front-facing camera. You probably won’t like how you look either - you’d look either sickly pale or drunken red, eyebags appear out of nowhere, the distortion of the lens makes you look fat. All of these qualities aren’t because you are any of these things in real life. It’s simply that laptop cameras are bad. Same is true for microphones and speakers.

I think you make a good point with the hardware aspects of this, and on this last point I can’t help but be a little amused, as while it’s often very true, personally I sometimes prefer the lower res quality of a laptop camera as it can help obfuscate some of the finer details I don’t much care for. It’s basically a hardware lo-fi filter, and I appreciate it not catching every pore. 😂