Okay, how much of this is due to it wide angle versus just being a shitty camera? I.e. do you think a camera with the same specs but different angle lens would have caught it?
Hard to tell because we have no idea what camera is being used here. But generally speaking even shitty cameras can produce decent daytime captures with good detail and this capture missed the intended purpose of the camera. I would actually guess that this is a 4k camera because that's what most (shitty) consumer grade cameras are. So while this means if the situation had occurred at night we probably would have seen an extremely blurry/ghosting capture, it should have captured a good daytime image with enough detail to see a license plate that close up. That's why I'm chalking it up to improper field of view more than anything.
You always need to keep your primary goals in mind when installing a camera. I'm sure the owner probably put this camera up to cover their shed and driveway for this exact possibility. However, because those objects only account for about 1/3 of the total field of view, they are wasting 2/3 of the available pixels on non-important objects. That means the level of detail on the important objects is 66% less than it could have been if they had installed a camera with an appropriate field of view that covered their desired objects and little else.
Now it is true that if this camera was set up with the proper settings, the capture likely would have been better too. I'm sure that the owner left everything on auto however and called it a day. But I'd still argue that a camera with the proper field of view would have provided much
sharper more detailed images and would therefore have a fighting chance of getting the license plate and perhaps even detailed enough footage to identify the perp.
Edit - I'll also note that this is one time where I think the camera is actually mounted TOO LOW. There is little advantage to mounting it this low and because it is so low, the car ends up blocking the camera from seeing the perp. Mounting it higher (above head height) would allow the camera to "see over the top of the car" and therefore be able to capture at least some footage of the perp as he walks behind the car (as viewed from the camera's perspective). Because the camera isn't suppose to capture things really close to the camera, being mounted higher would not be an issue.