Lidar can definitely be affected and cause focusing problems, but there’s protectors out there that have a hole for the lidar.
Image quality is affected, but in my testing the effects were minimal. I could only tell in side by side while zooming. If you intend to print your pictures in a large format at some point, then maybe it would matter, but if you keep the pictures phone sized then you won’t notice at all.
Also the worry of preventing lens scratches is real. Apple uses a sapphire lens that scratches easier than others, at about the same level that the front glass does. jerryrigeverything on YouTube has shown this repeatedly over the years.
From what I’ve seen online there’s not much difference in photo quality between the different models of the past few years.
For the pro models, 3x zoom is pretty sweet. I use macro mode pretty often, idk why it’s only for pro models but it’s pretty good. Night time portraits need lidar, they’re also nice to have on the rare times I use it.
Screen refresh at 120 is great, but the pros also can have very low refresh rate for always on displays.
The usb 3.0 on the pros support display port if you ever want to attach a monitor to your phone.
Those are the main reasons to get the pro imo