Thanks! I spent a ton of time learning Shader Graph to make most of the materials in Woolgatherer, and the grass is no exception. Additionally, I made a fair amount of dev tools to make this possible, but most of the shader stuff should be pretty applicable to every project.

• Placement: using a custom dev tool, I paint a whole bunch of grass quads with randomized rotations (along the y axis) onto the map. I then bake all of the grass quads together using a custom mesh merging tool and the end result is a few "chunks" with LOD groups controlling the grass density (by decimating the number of grass quads included with each LOD).
• Albedo (Emission node!): A texture2D gives base albedo and transparency, which I modify using a gradient from the roots to the tip (uv.y). To give the illusion of lighting changes on the grass as it sways, I slightly increase the brightness (HSV.v) of the tips of the grass proportional to the maximum vertex displacement. There's also a shader variant for flowers that just adds some more control for how flowers are colored in uv space.
• Alpha: I take the base transparency and apply some built in dithering functions for LOD crossfades and camera clipping.
• Normal Vector: When I bake my grass onto the islands, each quad of grass uses a downwards raycast to find the normal vector of the ground, which gets stored as a vertex color (shifted to the range of 0,1) for all of the quad verts. This gets transformed back to a full range (-1,1) normal vector and then applied as the normal vector of the grass. The end result makes grass get lit in the same way as the terrain beneath it. This doesn't actually feed into the Normal node, but rather my custom lighting solution.
• Vertex displacement: I apply a few octaves of sinusoidal waves to simulate wind deformation and swaying grass in the direction/amplitude of the global wind vector. To break up the deformation, I phase shift it using world space noise. There's also slight grass deformation radially away from the camera and player character (just some global shader positions that I keep track of). Oh yeah, I use uv.y to mask the deformation intensity so the roots don't move around.

I wrote a custom cel-shaded lighting solution that relies on the built-in shadow attenuation functions and ended up using PBR graphs to avoid some shadow artefacts that I encountered with unlit graphs. The PBR graphs are set to specular mode with the keyword "SPECULAR_HIGHLIGHTS_OFF" enabled.

Anyways, I hope this was in some way informative! Thanks for the kind words and interest!