I get why the box-shadow trick feels clever, but I don't think it's the right lesson here. Those layered shadows create a fuzzy glow that is not really a sun. It just looks like a blurred circle with some light around it. It works fine for a small widget, but the moment you want rays with actual shape, or the shadow colors need to shift with the time of day, you are back to fighting it. The divs and transforms were not the dumb part, hand rotating 40 of them was. A loop or an SVG would have done the same job and still looked like a real sun.

Did you find the smaller budget pushed you to drop the stuff that wasn't really paying off? We had a client do something close to this last year, cut us from 40 hours a month down to 15. I had to pick which five things actually moved the needle for them, and it turned out half our old report was stuff nobody read. That forced me to build a simple one pager that took an hour instead of a week, and we still use it for every client now.