The problem I see here is that the best images are those that have been edited, i.e. rotated, cropped, and adjusted brightness/contrast/saturation/white balance. Like I can have a thousand snaps from my camera, but they’ll only look good once I pick them out and edit them.

I suppose, if you have a consistent camera with photos in consistent conditions, you could apply edits in bulk. And I know Google has automated crop/rotate/etc features in the Google Photos app, so maybe you could find a self-hosted tool smart enough to do that across all your photos, then make a review pass to pick out the good ones.