Hi,
You're explaining a lot of what I've been encountering and have to say this is another great course.
Kind of a trivial question, I noticed in your model I opened in 3.3.7 is that all lights that typically have the knob you could grab to position the light is gone from your model (I created all the lights in the model and they were all knobless). See the attached pics, the one with the knob is typical from what I have seen and I haven't encountered this before. Did you adjust a setting or something? The line of direction on the lights are super long in your model as well,
I was going to see what happens if the light direction was rotated into the room with the Portal light. Does the Portal need to be flush to the window and we can't adjust the direction of light without adversely affecting something around the window when you render?
To tell you the truth, I've never ever used that knob, in fact sometimes it gets in the way. I guess that's why the devs decided to make it an overlay and you have the ability to make it go away. There's also great addons for lights on the Blender market that will save you tons of time with it comes to placing lights and HDRI. I have one called Gaffer, it's not that expensive and works great.
