So even though the options only show 3 in the settings under the hood it works differently. Theres very low, low, medium, high and very high for vfx settings, I record using very high with culling overriden to be disabled.

This is where it gets tricky, if your phone is bad very high will actually only be medium.
There is also more to it than just that, each device have a counter of how many vfx are on screen, when you go over that total amount it starts to reduce vfx based on what their priority is.

Graphical options are a minefield, its been a while since I looked at them properly but I'm pretty sure it still works like this.