No, it was EFB copies stored to textures that prevented the lens flare from working properly. You can see it here in an old version of the wiki page, under "Configuration".
I'm sure because I played with this quite a lot last year after finding that disabling the hack would eventually cause MK to crash for me so it was a trade-off between getting the lens flare or avoiding crashes. I settled for enabling the hack to avoid crashes at the small cost of losing the lens flare effect. I checked yesterday to see if I could now have both after a few months' worth of dolphin updates but found that the lens flare now doesn't work either way.
I'm sure because I played with this quite a lot last year after finding that disabling the hack would eventually cause MK to crash for me so it was a trade-off between getting the lens flare or avoiding crashes. I settled for enabling the hack to avoid crashes at the small cost of losing the lens flare effect. I checked yesterday to see if I could now have both after a few months' worth of dolphin updates but found that the lens flare now doesn't work either way.
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