Down to Brass Tacks Let's cut the crap.

Image sensors don’t have pixels

What they have are photodiodes.

Image sensors are therefore not digital devices, as the photodiodes they are made of are simple analog devices that convert light into an electric current. It is only later that those currents are converted into numerical values via an analog-to-digital converter.

But these numeric values are still not pixels, because each photodiode is only able to capture luminance, not color. One of the tricks to capture color is to place color filters in front of the photodiodes. The most common arrangement of such filters is called the Bayer Filter Array, which uses red, green and blue filters in a mosaic pattern.

Once the sensor has captured the luminance for each of the three primary colors in such a pattern of adjacent samples, the color of each pixel can finally be interpolated through a process called demosaicing.