Can a recent phone genuinely replace an entry-level interchangeable-lens camera now, or is that only true for photos nobody prints?

Your suspicion is correct and the honest framing is: the phone wins on processing, the camera wins on physics, and which matters depends entirely on the light.

The phone's advantage is that it takes a burst of frames and merges them, then applies tone mapping tuned by people who looked at millions of photos. That is why the sky is not blown out and the shadows are open. Your camera took one frame and handed you exactly what the sensor saw. Comparing a finished image to raw material is not a fair fight, and doing the same processing to the camera file closes most of that gap.

What the phone cannot do is collect more light. The sensor is small and the lens is tiny, and no amount of merging changes how much light arrived. In good light there is plenty and the difference is invisible. As light drops, the merging has less to work with and the gap opens fast.

So: bright daylight, the phone often wins outright. Dim indoor light, it is not close.

The visible losses, in the order most people notice them:

Subject separation. A small sensor with a wide lens keeps almost everything in focus. That is why portrait mode exists, and why it still fails at hair, glasses frames and anything with a gap in it — it is estimating a depth map rather than measuring light. On a normal photo of a person in front of a busy background, that is the difference you feel without being able to name it.

Reach. Digital zoom past the longest real lens is upscaling. A phone at 10x and a modest telephoto lens are not comparable, and this one shows up constantly in ordinary use — children on a stage, a bird, anything across a street.

Motion. Merging frames assumes the scene held still. A moving subject in dim light is where phone shots go soft or smeary, because the frames did not line up. A single fast exposure from a bigger sensor just works.

All three are ordinary photos, not test charts.

The variable missing from your list is whether you carry it.

A camera in a cupboard produces nothing. If the ageing body has been staying home, replacing it with a newer one will not change that — the reason it stays home is size and friction, and a new body has the same size and friction.

The question I would ask instead: over the last year, which photos do you actually care about, and which device took them? If the answer is overwhelmingly the phone, the camera was already replaced and this is a decision about admitting it. If there is a category the phone kept failing at, buy for that category specifically rather than buying a general upgrade.

On printing: resolution has not been the limit for a long time, and that is not what will let you down.

A 12 megapixel file prints A3 comfortably. Both of your candidates clear that easily, so "enough pixels" is a solved problem and you can stop weighing it.

What shows up in print is what the processing did to get that nice screen image. Heavy noise reduction turns fine texture — hair, fabric, foliage — into smooth patches, and aggressive sharpening leaves halos along edges. On a phone screen you see neither. At A3 on the wall, both are obvious, and the photo looks oddly plasticky in a way people notice without diagnosing.

If you print, that is the real argument for keeping the camera, and it is worth testing rather than taking my word for: print one of each at A3 and look at them from a foot away.