How each person achieves their own desired outcome is completely up to the individual.
I absolutely agree with this.
At the same time, it's up to the individuals if they like what they're seeing or not. On the other hand, art isn't always about liking or not liking something.
So, in my opinion as an artistic field photography is very hard to grasp or interpret, if you will. Even more so, since everybody and their dog turned into a photographer in the digital area with smartphones having cameras built in.
Therefore, a lot depends on context and intentions.
If you want to do documentary style photography, you'll lean towards staying as close to the real thing as possible. If you want to express or convey an idea or concept, pure visual reality isn't so important.
Talking about expressing and/or conveying ideas/concepts. Another (good) reason to move away from the pure picture taken on the camera stems from the fact that cameras just don't perceive the world as human eyes do. This starts with the composition of an exposure and is still something to be considered in post processing. The brain (as our organ of perception) works a lot with comparisons against things already known, can auto-correct the 3D perspective, performs pattern recognition, prioritises some objects over others (faces or text, for example) and so on. This is enhanced by the abilities of our retinas to recognize and amplify contrasts of objects bordering one another. Lacking many of these higher image processing capabilities, cameras act much more neutral and record reality in a different way. The 2D rendering of reality (the exposure) will not necessarily spark the same brain-processing that the same piece of reality will, due to a lack of some of realities features (movement for example).
So, in other words, even if you want your photos to be as close to reality as possible, you have to "correct" for the way the spectators' brain will perceive this part of reality in the exposures. Essentially, translating those brain-processing functions back to reality is what led to the rules of composition.
Problem is, not everybody perceives everything in the same way. This is not only caused by biological differences between each individual but also by cultural differences between groups of people. Stuff like the preferred direction of reading text (left to right, right to left or top to down) have an impact on the most suitable composition in regard to the expected group of spectators of an image.
To sum up: every image has composition (good or bad) and every image needs processing (up to now, no human features a neural interface to work with the digital raw data of the camera sensor).
This leads me back to my initial "context and intention". Without being able to at least guess the context and the intentions behind taking an image in the first place and the way it was processed, makes it very difficult to get a handle on the quality of the image-generation-process as a whole.
This doesn't mean some things aren't obviously badly executed. We all know those guys dragging around very expensive gear and then take pictures in broad daylight of far away objects with the built-in flashes of their cameras, because for whatever reason the automatic mode decided to use it. In those cases it's hard to believe the use of the flash has anything to do with the intention of the photographer.
I.e. credibility is another issue.
An image taken by a photojournalist in the middle of riot carries a different "weight" - even if it has technical flaws - than a picture taken at the same place two days prior without any people around. The same is true for known artists vs. unknown artists. It's very difficult to be neutral if the artist already has an acclaimed name. If that person does things the way he does, there has to be a good reason. If a nobody does the same thing, people are much more skeptical. Humans are just not objective.
In closing, this is indeed a very philosophical topic. I simply do (or try to do) whatever I personally think is the right way to get to the result I have in mind. If others like the results, good. If not, too bad, but not the end of the world. If I can learn from the feedback, even better.