What are you offering that they can’t offer themselves with their phones? Seriously. That’s the question you need to have an answer for.

In the old days, we avoided zooms because of all the extra glass needed to do the zoom part. A perfectly good prime lens might have 4-6 pieces of glass in it. A zoom lens a dozen of more (like a modern prime). Every extra piece of glass mattered. I guess it either somehow doesn’t anymore, or the cameras are designed to compensate in away not possible with film. I don’t know and I don’t own any of these monstrosities anyway.

But, the OP’s comparison is not really valid, since you really need to compare the weight (and hypothetical size) of 4 old prime lenses to one modern one to get close to the equivalent glass.

Practice and use focus peaking if your camera has it. Also, depth of field can be your friend.

Older cameras and lenses were designed for manual focus. Both in the view finders and in the giant lens focus rings with big rubber grips. Cameras were meant to be used manually before AF came along. It is an unfortunate fact of modern cameras that they are optimized and designed to be used as automatically as possible and only begrudgingly allow manual use anymore. People were good at the lost art of focusing in the manual SLR days because the cameras made it easy and people had plenty of practice at it.

The other problem in play is the modern philosophy of photography where sharpness of focus is seemingly even more important than composition. This is an expected artifact of the availability of finely focusing cameras among people who can’t really take a picture. So here we are.

The internet, the vast majority of the time, is a solution in search of a problem. It’s best not to forget that fact.

Nobody random on the Internet cares about your photos. They don’t care about mine either. They don’t even care about your photos if you have the new Sony Super-camera with the tack sharp 5mm-800mm f.1 zoom that only weighs 2oz. In fact, they especially don’t care about THAT.

My point here is that there is nothing wrong with doing something because you enjoy doing it. You don’t need affirmation from any random person. The enjoyment of your work by your friends and family is the most you should hope for. It’s all that matters anyway. I know the phrase “gig economy” and the existence of “influencers” has convinced everyone with a half decent camera that they are one algorithm away from being crowned the next Ansel, but it’s not true and never will be. Value comes from scarcity, and the Internet has made everything on it abundant. Nobody cares about what you do. Except you. Just appreciate that.