In general, Frontier has opted for the most flashy version of scientifically accurate as possible. But in this case, the seasick head-mounted lensing effect detracts from the beauty of the game. So it is as unrealistic as it is ugly and nauseating.
There is no benefit to it, so it is either a technical challenge or an oversight. In either case, Frontier should do whatever they can to address it so that black holes can get a little dignity back. If they aren't going to be deadly, then they should at least look bigger than a beach ball.
From my (I admit rather limited) experience in how games draw this kind of stuff, I'd hazard to guess it's a technical limitation, or rather technical limitations:
The galaxy skymap that is drawn when you enter a local instance is not a collection of light sources, but a canvas that moves with our point of view: Long distance super cruise flights have proven that you don't get closer to other star systems in any meaningful sense. The lensing effect is applied onto that canvas from our point of view, not the other way around. There is no incoming light the game engine could render; that kind of 'seeing' in a computer game is an active looking at things, not a passive perception of light like in reality. (Leaving aside all the interpretation that goes around in our brains for the sake of simplicity.) Option A - that optical voodoo - is often what happens because unlike reality, our point of view is the only thing that is there in any meaningful sense.
Not to compare apples with oranges, but a skymap in Half-Life 2, for example, is never further away than 512 feet, but it doesn't come closer either, it just vanishes when you noclip through it. You could have a sun up there casting light that appeared to be parallel, but as soon as there would be any distortion effects, the light used for calculating them would be emitted from a rather close distance. (It leads to effects not unlike what we see around a black hole.) And maybe the huge ship isn't that far off from what happens as well. Back in Half-Life 2 again, you could have three-dimensional skymaps by scaling objects down, hiding them somewhere on the map, and telling the renderer to treat them as larger objects in the background. It was a cheap trick to make maps appear bigger than they were.
In a game on the scale of Elite Dangerous, there are probably a lot of these tricks used to overcome the distances involved. In reality, we might be very small compared to the curvature of space. In the game, we only appear to be, and in cases like black holes, the voodoo involved probably meets its limitations.
That's all speculation and guesswork, and I agree that it doesn't look right, and that it should be changed. But the process of creating game world visuals is centered around us, not around our knowledge of the physical universe. It rather resembles old beliefs on how vision works, or how the universe is structured. There really are spheres in the sky you can push your head through in a game world.
- would be much smaller -mathematically singular-, but the event horizon -or "firewall"- would still be rather large) - and you would be very close - few meters, then yes, but not with the scale we have.
