Good thing in real life there's no such thing as truly zero photons, then (which is a detail the article actually shortly touches upon). Also, if that type of

Good thing in real life there's no such thing as truly zero photons, then (which is a detail the article actually shortly touches upon). Also, if that type of "wonky" throws off your rendering pipeline, you're bound to get something else wrong. Such as ever having a linear scale with a small number of bits in your pipeline. The linear scaled brightness stays afloat all the way through (cause floats have this handy feature of being transparently sorta-logarithmic in the way they use their bits, even 16-bit floats beat 20-bit ints for that purpose), only at the very end you apply the tonemap+gamma function(s), then dither, then truncate to fixed (8) bit integer.