This isn't specifically a Star Wars thing; but it is just incredibly baffling how obsessed Hollywood is with crushing dynamic range. It does not make any intuitive sense and I don't think I've ever seen anyone who is responsible make an argument for the point behind this stylistic choice.
In a technical sense, filming in HDR and then flattening the contrast like this would be like filming in 4K and then downscaling to 1K or even standard definition for release.
I'm not even sure they needed to up the contrast that much. You could probably retain more detail and get a better shot just by upping the value on the colors. I mean, if I was in light room tweaking this, that's what I would do.
I'm just a hobbyist long exposure night photographer, but my process is to take a shot, and flatten it like the shot on the left, because that's how you pull blown out detail from a RAW image. Then I go back for more passes, and on each pass I do things like up the saturation, and tweak the lights, and darks, and colors, and maybe tweak noise if I have to (I'm doing long exposures with ISO 100, so if there's noise I fucked up the shot so bad I should probably just delete it). When I edit, I get all the detail I can, and then destroy some of the detail, in order to make the colors pop. I try not to do anything too extreme with my photos, because I still try to get them to come out of the camera as close to what I want as possible.
This is one of my most processed shots, before and after. The top shot is after editing, the bottom shot is before editing. I had to put this online to show other photographers who want to evaluate my skill, because they are always asking how much of my stuff is in the camera and how much is photoshop. Yes, that's me. No, I can't prove it was me, because I'm blurry, because it's a 30 second long exposure in -10 degree wind chill, with the wind howling, at like 3 AM. The light quality was gorgeous that night, though.
Anyway... looks to me like Hollywood is shooting the film basically in a format that is analogous to RAW, so they can de-saturate to pull out detail, just like I do in my first pass, but then they don't bother going back and deciding how much detail they want to give up for some color. They just decided color is not important, and they want all the detail, because they are stupid. Either that, or maybe their editors are all color blind.
I think Disney movies are the worst with this. Not just Star Wars, but most of the MCU films are really bad with this. Shang Chi is a recent notable exception. I loved the cinematography on Shang Chi, on all levels, not just the color grading.
To my mind, this is a totally different issue than hiding bad action sequences by putting the action in the dark, and using shaky cam, and quick cuts, so nobody knows what's going on. I think the most recent Mortal Kombat was the worst with that shitty technique.
