In your opinion

I agree with the idea that it is a construct to access the plot/characters with some apparent arbitrariness. short cutting the flabby scene building and back story crap that might block the action / emotion of the film.

Try and imagine your opening shots for a traditional floating observation point of view or gauche, auteur style of shooting for this plot. Dull scene setting, long shot of high school students arriving, endless suburban sprawl, identikit houses/driveways - The temptation to establish all this in an early, throw-away aerial shot would be a sort of technical betrayal of the 'wow I can fly' stuff later.

Someone realising they can fly, these days, would film it straight off. Then you would have a terrible iphone style footage, load of crap film. They had to crow-bar film technique/visual language into the story's exposition. Hence the original piss-poor old camcorder type thing is replaced by Steve / Matt when they feel sorry for Andy's lost camera (and his apparent social-camouflage) in the hole in the ground. Thereafter we get better definition (a "$500 camera" when family money was short) and cue the SFX etc

There is greater subtlety at play too.

Andy's old/new camera POV is 'their' shared experience of their powers. It intimately informs / mirrors Andy's outsider/observer character with further, growing narcissism obviously. The CCTV, police, media footage displays firstly the action taking place at a remove from the previous personal level and thus it's objective impact on the world at large / others.

I especially liked the way Andy commandeers the smart phones and other devices of the rubber-necking guys in the nearby high-rise building during the denouement as this is nicely self-reflexive, semi-confessional and contrasts, yet marries well, to the Blog-girl's "film everything there may be something worth seeing - even if by the process of filming alone" schtick/ world-vew...

E.g. I'm not here, this is just happening around me, I'm not in charge or responsible for anything, I just watched it all happen, mass self-licensed nihilism.

Whereas Andy has this "now you're all watching perhaps you'll listen to me for once" failure realisation that leads almost inevitably to his demise.

On a realism note, the Akira influence having been mentioned elsewhere, there was no acknowledge either of a 'establishment interest' in this turn of events (e.g. military co-opting of the project/phernomenon in Akira) or, there again, a more straight-forward police/army response (Akira again) of simply opening fire on the uncannily powerful persons and worrying about process or ethics later...

My God it's full of stars...