It's like these people never took a projector light and pointed it down at a surface and ask themselves what does looking up at that like light look like with the scales that I've used in my model.

Even if they don't know 3D programming all they have to do is take a pot light and a desk and put the pot light close to the desk so that it lights up half of it had to go and then move it around and look at the shape of the light changing as it moves further away from you and closer.

It's like somebody suggested that it was a projector and all of the flat earthers went oh okay and then nobody ever bothered to think about what it would actually look like if it was a projector.

But seriously though like f*** this would be one of the easiest things to set up as a scene in blender. Literally you put down a flat disk and a projector light source set to move on a circular path, then set the camera to be on the disk pointed at the projector.

It literally would have taken them like an afternoon to test it in the physical world and like probably 15 minutes if they knew what they were doing on the computer.