I don't know much about lighting, but looking at the source code of the shaders might give a clue. https://modrinth.com/discover/shaders has a lot of shaders that change the lighting. In other parts of the rendering pipeline, there are some very impressive mods utilizing GPU magic. One of them is Voxy (https://modrinth.com/mod/voxy), one that massively increases render distance with mesh shaders and level-of-detail based rendering.
Ah yeah, I was mostly interested in lighting, but that's really interesting too.
Voxy's LOD thing... so like, I guess what they do is when you're in an area so that area's high LOD assets are loaded, it computes the lower LOD and saves it, and then as you move around you get a library of more and more lower LODs? And since modifications to geometry only happen when you're nearby the LODs are static? I'd love to see a writeup of that too...
