A little ding is enough to render a camera lens pretty useless.
Allegedly.

Allegedly allegedly allegedly

  • The Onion
So you allege.
A cracked lens still takes pictures pretty well without any visual artefacts
Most lenses only care about the angular light distribution, essentially averaging over the lens surface. So a ding or crack would just add a tiny portion of grey or black to the entire image
that’s true, good point