I know what you mean, my theory is that it's an emergent property from RLHF tuning penalizing examples of bad/incoherent lighting, which pushes the model toward

I know what you mean, my theory is that it's an emergent property from RLHF tuning penalizing examples of bad/incoherent lighting, which pushes the model towards that kind of vague "lit from everywhere" style which is relatively easy to sell as correct without a proper understanding of light transport. It looks amateurish because that's the same trick an amateur human might use to try to sell photorealism without good lighting fundamentals.