This is just because most of the academic researchers in the field (basically mathematicians/programmers) have horrible aesthetic taste and poor understanding of human vision, not because the concept of local contrast control is inherently bad.
HDR “tonemapping” when well done doesn’t call attention to itself, and you won’t notice it per se.
This is a problem with image processing in general. Researchers are looking for something to demo at SIGGRAPH to non-artists. They want something very obvious and fancy on a few hand-picked images for a 5 minute talk. They aren’t necessarily trying to build general-purpose tools for artists.
Real photographers use all kinds of trickery to control contrast and dynamic range. Ansel Adams tweaked the hell out of his photographs at every stage from capture to print, using pre-exposed negatives, non-standard chemistry timings, contrast-adjusting masks sandwiched with negatives, tons of dodging and burning, etc.
The old term was “printing”, but to a layman that now connotes pressing a button to get an inkjet or whatever.
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You can certainly come up with automatic operators which look better than “hard clip everything brighter than 1.0”.
I agree though that there should be more work put into making usable tools for artists instead of “let’s magically fix the picture in one click”.
Check out these photos - https://imgur.com/a/cisJY - this was shot with a DSLR with 14 stops of dynamic range. My eyes couldn't see much in the dark spots when I was looking at the bright buildings.
These same RAW photos look horrible (and I mean really, unbearably bad) with "linear mapping".
As long as you're rendering in a linear space (which means simply that you've gamma-corrected all your inputs) and displaying with a display gamma applied, then you're fine.
Beyond that you might choose to emulate a "film look" by applying an S-curve to your image.
EDIT: also, you really don't want to be clamping at all when saving images - just write out a floating-point OpenEXR file.