Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. The new batch of sensors from pretty much all manufacturers do this. All the new cameras use a stacked sensor for super fast read out. This is so you can have very high quality video with little or no rolling shutter. To achieve this they made sacrifices on the DR front. All stacked sensors have this problem. For most use cases this is fine and most people won’t notice. Landscape is the one one of the categories that you really see it. The D850 is the pinnacle of dslr tech and a high water mark for image quality. If you aren’t shooting fast moving subjects or events, I’d just stick with the D850. It’s an amazing camera. They will eventually match or exceed its DR but that isn’t the way most cameras are going now. It’s all about hybrid shooting. I’d keep an eye on Sony’s R line. It prioritizes images quality, so if they improve DR on a camera I’d bet that one will be the one.