I am a keen amateur (very) photographer and have been for many years. Just wish I could get better! I think an important decision is what you want the photos for? If it just general snappy happy then a good phone camera will do the job for you. In fact my wife now uses her iPhone 7 rather than a Canon Ixus, so don’t disregard the quality of an iPhone or equivalent.
If you want to get more from your images by post processing, using something like Lightroom or Affinity, then a Panasonic Lumix TZ series camera is very near the top of the list. I use a Panasonic TZ80 as my pocket travel camera. The advantages of these are that they shoot in Raw and you can choose both aperture or shutter priority. Raw is a storage format, similar to jpg, but this retains all the data related to the image whilst something like jpg makes decisions for you and bins a good chunk of the image data. Images are then processed using a software programme. You may also wish to consider how important a viewfinder v rear LCD screen is to you. I am sufficiently old fashioned that I would use a viewfinder by preference.
For general photography the Sony RX cameras are both pocketable and high quality. Sony is noted for the richness of their colours and jpgs. Expensive, the top end ones are four figures, but very good.
If you want go a little further than you might like to consider the micro four thirds, M43, style cameras. These are serious bits of kits akin to digital single lens reflex cameras but designed around digital rather than analogue technology. Hence smaller and lighter but with remarkable image quality, you can pick up a good secondhand Olympus OM-D E-M10 for a couple of hundred and their lens are very good too, although at the top end you can pay around a grand if you want to. My first M43 camera was a Panasonic G3 and was brilliant, very cheap now.
If you have special interests, such as nature photography, then of course appropriate kit will cost you. For a good first step in pocketable, quality cameras then the TZ series are hard to beat, but for similar money you can get on the first rung of M43, whatever you do though my advice would be to think how you will store, catalogue and process your images, the so called workflow. Think it through now and save yourself some angst later!
Good luck and enjoy.
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