[frabcus]

Firstly it can render environments in detail. I'm (mostly) aphantasic even in dreams, so this wasn't obvious to me. But most people literally get visual renderings in their mind.

Secondly, it's fairly clear now that our sensory inputs are not being experienced as sensory inputs. We experience a reconstruction. Obvious basic sign of this is that we fill in the gap in vision where the optic nerve is. But generally, we're making an integrated world model all the time out of the senses, and are conscious of that world model.

You're right though, both the above are rendering the experience and can take shortcuts for that. It's sufficiently detailed in each case though that it kinda is rendering the world too, in some sense.