With film, ISO usually isn’t treated as a shot-by-shot control. You normally pick a film speed/emulsion for the roll, then adjust exposure using aperture, shutter speed, and sometimes lighting. In that sense, film often requires more advance planning around expected light and the look of a particular film.

Digital gives you more freedom because ISO can be changed for each frame. That doesn’t make exposure less important—it gives you one more creative variable to manage. Instead of only balancing aperture and shutter speed, you’re balancing all three: aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.

In practice, that means you can raise ISO to get a faster shutter speed or a smaller aperture when light changes, or lower ISO when you want the cleanest image or wider apertures in bright light. The trade-off is noise: more light on the sensor generally gives less noise, so increasing ISO is useful, but it’s usually better to gather more light when possible. Still, higher ISO is often preferable to motion blur or severe underexposure.

So digital ISO flexibility usually isn’t “laziness.” It shifts planning from choosing one film speed ahead of time to making exposure decisions for each shot.