My journey into shaders started in Unity with Shader Graph and I eventually wound up using some much older ideas - Baked GI w/ the standard URP lit shader [0]. The built-in shaders already give you most of what an average gamer could ask for:

> The Lit Shader lets you render real-world surfaces like stone, wood, glass, plastic, and metals in photo-realistic quality. Your light levels and reflections look lifelike and react properly across various lighting conditions, for example bright sunlight, or a dark cave. This Shader uses the most computationally heavy shading model in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

If you add on top of this a willingness to bake lights [1] like it's the early 2010s again, you can achieve extremely high quality scenes without getting tied up in distracting code paths and tools. Your time is much better spent out in the field acquiring actual textures, meshes, audio samples, etc. Painting & lighting an exotic texture IRL and then using a depth-sensing camera to capture it can be orders of magnitude more productive.

[0] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...

[1] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...