I can't find anyone talking about this and I'm going insane trying to find out if my unit is just defective. Look at these comparison photos between my Pixel 6 and the Gopro; that's insane! I have cameras from the year 2006 that shoot better quality.
I've also attached a bigger photo from a real scenario and it has a really strange pixel pattern that I can't make heads or tails of. It's like the resolution of the image is foveated and this quirk does not show up in any reviews I can find.
16k and even 8k is also a metric crap ton of data. Raw 8k @ 24 FPS is around 640 MB/second of data. Bump the frame rate and the numbers get big. Red cameras shooting 8K @ 75 fps chew just over 2 GB/second.
To be fair, I was focusing on still photography, given the community and the pictures the OP posted :)
That being said, video is often more forgiving of a slight reduction in pixel count, because noise and slight softness can get hidden behind motion blur to some extent.
Also, most action cams won't be shooting RAW video. They tend to use non colour gradable compressed formats that work straight out of the camera, and that makes the space consumption a lot more manageable.