You're still rendering the sprites, but you're not actually rendering the light itself. You're on no shaders too so you can't actually see the light being emitted by those lights because there's nothing to light up (it'd need some brick vertices that aren't on the brick itself).
If you look closer on MINIMUM or higher shaders, you can see that light will actually emit from only seven of those.
Nothing was updated, it's the same old functionality.
If my understand of OpenGL is correct and Badspot/Kompressor/Whomever decided to use GL_Light0-7, then there's no way, without changing engine code, that you could get more lights. What you can actually see in my picture is 6 full bright lights and 2 dimmer lights. Im pretty sure it renders the 6 closest, and then blends between the last closest 2 lights (which is why there's actually 8 lights and why there's a nice blending effect kinda going on).
All the sprites are still rendered so, yeah, it may look like more lights, but there really isn't.
Not sure how Plexious in the gallery topic made so many lights. Perhaps it was image processed afterwords or he found a way to run multiple lighting passes using each GL_Light0-7 multiple times and then adding all their contributions to the final rendering.
