Just saw some comments on the xEdit Discord this morning from ElminsterAU, the primary dev for the project. He's been backwards-engineering Starfield since it came out, tweaking his project to make it work for Starfield. This is important because, as soon as he does, (safe) plugin-based mods become possible, opening up the floodgates for a whole new class of Starfield mods. Only, in its current state, he's not sure he can make it work. Or, for that matter, that the CK due from BGS "early next year" can make it work, either.
The image I've posted is a collection of carefully selected snippets of a much larger discussion, with all the supporting info being excluded for brevity. This is "headline reporting" at its worst, so I encourage anyone tracking this topic to go to the Discord and dive deeper.
Maybe he's having a bad morning after spending all night attempting to decipher undocumented code that is, literally, legacy built upon legacy built upon even older legacy. But if it's really this bad, then the modding scene for Starfield is going to have a much harder time getting started than is currently being anticipated.
Speculating, I'm guessing this is a side effect from adopting The Forge for rendering and animation. I'll bet those missing formids are now stored somewhere else, possibly outside the esp itself. Apparently something similar happens in the NIF format.
I don't believe the formids are missing or the game wouldn't run. They're just stored somewhere a little counter-intuitive.
Interesting. Your comment is the first mention I've seen of that. Their page on global illumination is interesting. On the one hand, their little trailer shows the system displaying more detail than Starfield does, but on the other hand in their last screenshot they failed to build the lighting the same way as the reference photo.