[jasonwatkinspdx]

The quote is about overcoming a technical constraint that forces laborious placing of secondary lights to restore behavior that you get for free in the physical world.

It's not claiming that design or art in lighting is unnecessary. It's freaking obvious that's necessary.

[chipsy]

To elaborate: Only about a decade ago, 3D game lights were almost uniformly "additive spheres" supplemented with some ambient or directional light. They didn't bounce or diffuse properly. Environments and characters each had separate lighting treatments, making the characters look like "cut outs" in most circumstances. Reflective surfaces were a special case feature, and most details could only be represented with a cleverly painted texture. Everything was faked, and as such, the art of a lot of these games had to hew closely to tech limitations.

Between then and now we've gradually gained enough GPU power to move towards a unified, real-time lighting model with most of the desired real-world properties. Although limits still exist, we can finally start addressing lighting primarily from the designer's perspective.