Bloom... a fad? Bloom is a real thing in the real world. Especially in lower latitudes and in the summer, bloom is visible on pretty much everything; streets, clothing, flowers, trees, etc. Don't forget that the eye is a lens. Lens flare can too be experienced with just your eyes. Furthermore, if you happen to wear contact lens or -worse- glasses, you should experience more severe lens flare effects more often. Oh, and if you happen to have high astigmatism, even if you wear contact lens, no matter how expensive your contact lens are -and mine are quite expensive-, you will experience strange lighting effects around light sources, such as fuzzy halos, star-shaped effects (Fraunhofer diffraction), pentagonal-shaped or hexagonal-shaped artifacts, strong, circular, big-radius halos around big light sources and much more.
I've never experienced bloom in the real world. I agree that the sun can be overpoweringly bright, but I don't call that bloom; it's simply bright. Lens flare is something I typically associate with multi-lens systems. Eyes have only 1 lens.
I've never even thought of how contacts or glasses could cause such effects. I guess I can see where that could happen. After all, they both make eyes into multi-lens systems. And astigmatism? Hmmm, interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. It's funny that the topic has never come up before in my life.
I have to inject a caveat here. I've had 20/5 or 20/10 vision for the vast majority of my life. I'm used to seeing things very, very crisply, whether close up or far away. Seeing things with artifacts is foreign to me and, to be honest, something I only associated with artificial or man-made objects, like camera lenses. The idea that they could happen to natural systems is an odd thing for me.
So, I guess for some people artifacts like lens flare are part of the way they see the world, although, THB, I suspect most of it is still mostly artificial, in the sense they see the effects due to contacts and glasses, which by nature are artificial. That said, if you need glasses or contacts to see, then these artifacts are part of your life (at least until science and medicine can develop a way to see without glasses or lenses )
However, I still think they're a fad that will, eventually, fade.