It's a cloud reflection. I think people are generally attributing a little bit much in terms of what "upscaling" really does. Especially on an iPhone, which I used, that does not do traditional "upscaling."
Still, that's very apparent on large ad posters Apple used to make "shot with an iPhone", a zoomed in photo looks like it consists of irregular patches of solid colour, not pixels. That's what I called upscaling, that's what my old Honour used to do to photos when it fell flat on actually capturing the details, and maybe that's what others meant, too.
On these I would've guessed only 1 or 1+2, but since you said that the photos in the post were shot on the iPhone, and there is a preview that shows that the third is a photo from the post, I expect that I'm wrong.
But yes, the third zoom-in is what I expect to see on a low postprocessing camera, and the first photo is more or less what I imagine from a high postprocessing camera.
No big deal with the crop, you were right that the third doesn't look like what I had in mind. Most likely I'm not informed enough on what iPhones use for photo improvements, maybe I will read something about that