Sure — but people reasonably distinguish between photos and digital art, with “photo” used to denote the intent to accurately convey rather than artistic expression.
We’ve had similar debates about art using miniatures and lens distortions versus photos since photography was invented — and digital editing fell on the lens trick and miniature side of the issue.
This is a longstanding debate in landscape photography communities - virtually everyone edits, but there’s real debate as to what the line is and what is too much. There does seem to be an idea of being faithful to the original experience, which I subscribe to, but that’s certainly not universal.
There are a whole lot of landscape photographs out there I can vouch for their realism 1% of the time because I do a lot of landscape photography myself and tend to get out at dawn and dusk a lot. There are lots of shots I got where the sky looked a certain way for a grand total of 2 minutes before sunrise, and I can see similar lighting in other peoples' shots as real.
A lot of armchair critics on the internet who only go out to their local park at high noon will say they look fake but they're not.
There are other elements I can spot realism where the armchair critic will call it a "bad photoshop". For example, a moon close to the horizon usually looks jagged and squashed due to atmospheric effects. That's the sign of a real moon. If it looks perfectly round and white at the horizon, I would call it a fake.
We’ve had similar debates about art using miniatures and lens distortions versus photos since photography was invented — and digital editing fell on the lens trick and miniature side of the issue.