[mort96]

Why would a lack of conditionals remove the need for uber shaders..? Or why would the presence of conditionals cause a need for uber shaders? How are these connected?

It's common to have many shader variants exactly because you want to avoid 'if' statements; conditionals are turned into shader-compile-time options. Uber shaders are about turning those compile-time options back into runtime options to have a fallback shader to run while the right shader variant is being compiled.