I don't know if I'm way out to left field on this, but there was an sepolicy change needed for the Pixel 6[ Pro] in order to allow the camera software to access the DSP for accelerated image processing. Before that, the Pixel 6 was slow like is being reported in this thread.
Was that change incorporated in the Pixel 7? Has it been properly validated that it doesn't need some tweaking for the minor differences?