[lcrs]

Colour in the Photoshop/gamedev world is often handled pretty casually, but if you're interested the moving picture world gets a lot more rigorous about it and there's tons of documentation around the ACES system in particular: https://github.com/colour-science/colour-science-precis https://acescentral.com/knowledge-base-2/

As you suggest storage in linear 16-bit float is standard, the procedure for calibrating cameras to produce the SMPTE-specified colourspace is standard, the output transforms for various display types are standards, files have metadata to avoid double-transforming etc etc. It is complex but gives you a lot more confidence than idly wondering how the RGB triplets in a given JPG relate to the light that actually entered the camera in the first place...

[pixelfarmer]

They also have lens sets which have the same external form factor regardless of focal length (i.e. makes it easy to swap, use same filters, etc.) and the lenses are made so the color reproduction of each one in a set is the same as well. And going further "to the source" it also plays into the (artificial) lighting used and so on. Which is why all that stuff is so expensive to begin with.