It’s probable that textures were not mapped by the hardware and thus had to be simplified to work at a reasonable rendering speed (i.e. it doesn’t matter if it looks great if it takes a month to render a scene). It’s amusing that what took Big Aluminum back then could be done much better with an average desktop today.
If you want to see the direct [spiritual] descendant of TLS’s effects, check out Babylon 5. If the people who did the latter weren’t fans of the former, it’s gotta be one of the biggest coincidences in moviedom.