So you are really surprised fake 40x zoom using garbage AI upscaling on a very small pixel count digital crop is producing upscaled crap. Take a look at the garbage results coming from the Pixel 10, and its laughable 100x zoom, where the results are atrocious.
I will never use anything but the optical zoom (which produce nice results obviously)and if I need to I'll crop my own images.
Nothing to see here, move along.
40x looks ok, given it's an extreme crop, still much better than those washed out artificial looking ones from Androids. At least it sounds quite natural.
Better than plain post-crop from 4x. For example, can you see the extra details of white flowers or Apple logo on original image? No. Maybe even on the true size image, not provided here. But visible on 40x.
40x magnification is not something for everyday use, so you may rather be limited to 8x for quality images.