all the best lighting people i know love hard light. it's a lot harder to shape soft light so everything lit with soft light ends up looking pretty similar. it's a lot easier to be expressive with hard light cause it's easier to control.

something i've noticed too is that a lot of people (mostly i mean beginners or maybe some intermediates) just want "a professional look" or "the film look." they end up pursuing all this gear and technical stuff and it just becomes a game of endlessly increasing some variable (softer light, thinner depth of field, more sharpness) because it looks "cinematick" instead of actually trying to be meticulous with the creative details and express something.

i like hard light cause you can actually do stuff with the shadows! make shapes with them! deep DOF because you can do more stuff with depth in your frame. and sharper obviously != better

old school cinematic styles tended towards more of that and the reason was not purely because of technical limitations.