I got the 8 Pro after waiting for a smaller Pro with telephoto for years. the 8 felt almost too small, and I think the 9/9Pro is even "smaller".
I love having telephoto and retired my 2014 mirrorless camera with it's 18-55 55-200 lenses. But I like using the pro mode and manual lens selection. the jump from 1x to 5x is actually quite big so you end up with quite wide range of lenses 0.5x-5x but a big gap from x1 to x5, and the closer to 5x you get, the more the cropping and scaling becomes obvious and make the image soft and the artifacts more obvious. if you are just below 5x or sometimes 5x but the camera switches to wide because of focus distance, you are only using 1/25 of the sensor data captured from the wide lens... I guess it's a trade off between offering long focal lens, and decent image quality all around. I'd rather have x3-x4 and crop for really long focal, than crop everything between 1x and 5x. if you want 5x or even longer telephoto lens, I think you need 4 lenses? but Google prioritizes sensor size and light sensitivity over number of lenses.