-1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting.

A focal plane mere inches thick!

Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should!

But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.