Could be billboards like some of the star effects that rotate tied to your ship and catching those is surprisingly disappointing, I won't say immersion breaking but just not elegant; maybe another solution would cost too many cycles or just turned out to be impractical.Yeah that was me.
But Will's statement is quite broad, could just mean they have 3 lightning patterns instead of 1 rather than the video footage is a proof of concept and not "in-game effect footage" as I'm thinking.
I'm almost thinking the lightning was edited in afterwards, might be wrong though, I guess we'll find out soon enough.
So yeah, previews are WIP but let's see it in game and then can judge.