[Kaijo]

It isn't just a question of their visual representation in culture. Many major taxonomic works on Lepidoptera only provide illustrations of species in the pinned-out format. This is even more of an issue with moths than butterflies as moths show such a huge diversity of distinctive postures and wing configurations -- tucked up and folded away and overlapped in all kinds of unlikely and bizarre morphologies. I can think of so many weird examples, but to take one, check out this lasiocampid moth I found in Borneo some years back: https://i.imgur.com/auo2t9l.jpeg

If you manage to find that species in the standard work to consult, the eighteen-volume Moths of Borneo[1], you'll only see images of a pinned-out specimen, which makes it look like all the others. The motivation for this was to provide a standardized format for the formal visual depiction moth and butterfly anatomy, principally for taxonomists who will be working with dead specimens, and where the actual delimitation and description of taxa is done mostly using microscopic characters. But how moths hold their wings gives very valuable diagnostic information for both field ID and broader questions of classification, that would be very useful to see in a standard reference. This is increasingly recognized and I know of several recent large monographs and ongoing surveys that emphasize including photographs or illustrations of the in situ appearance.

[1] https://www.mothsofborneo.com/