What a shoot buys
A real photographer, a real model and a real location produce something generated imagery does not: proof the garment exists, photographed as it hangs, in a place that was actually there.
For a campaign, a hero piece, or anything where the photograph is itself the claim, book the shoot. Nothing here argues otherwise, and a tool that tells you it has replaced photography is selling you something.
What a shoot costs
A model, a photographer, a location, styling and editing. Then a week for the files. Then a second booking, because three pieces were missed and one came out wrong.
None of that is the expensive part. The expensive part is the fixed capacity: a shoot day holds a certain number of pieces, and every piece past that number waits for the next one, or never gets photographed at all.
The pieces that never get shot
The bottom of the list gets cut first: the repeats, the colourways, the odd sizes, the slow sellers. Those are also the listings that convert worst, and the reason they convert worst is that they are the ones with the bad photographs.
It is a loop. The pieces that sell badly do not earn a shoot, and not earning a shoot is why they sell badly.
The split we would actually recommend
Shoot the hero pieces and the campaign. Generate the long tail, the colourways, the marketplace crops, the refresh of the listings you photographed three years ago, and the one frame you need to redo this afternoon.
That division is not a compromise. It is each method doing the thing it is good at, and it happens to put the expensive method on the small number of images where it changes the outcome.