Appearrances, apparently

Looks like a couple fans in the back but I can't tell if they're blocked off or not

Its water cooled so ventilation is less of a necessity as long as the radiators get air flow.

good ventilation still helps a lot even in water cooled systems. Especially if its so many things in such an old chassis. Some parts have gotten smaller on average and other parts have gotten a bit bigger so the placement of stuff with how the chassis was designed will be a lot different.

glowy usually does indicated high strength parts because they know people are more likely to buy their more expensive parts if they look pretty

Wtf did I read, the cheapest graphics cards nowadays have RGB lighting, really expensive versions which are used for high end video editing and or animation (e.g: Disney) use turbo versions which often don't even have any special lighting or extra ordinary design, just have a look at the Quadro series from nvidia which still has the casing of the gtx series ( https://www.nvidia.com/de-de/design-visualization/quadro-desktop-gpus/ ).
Lighting and "shininess" are just marketing tricks because people associate that with power

You very obviously know a shitload more about this than me, but i think beth's argument was "because people associate glowy leds with power, people who do powerful stuff tend to add glowy stuff because it tends to be something people who buy powerful stuff are attracted to".
Kind of a self fullilling prophecy.
Obviously that wouldn't be the case in "industrial" grade stuff, as you then actually have qualified people judge by performance only, but if youre appealing to gamers and whatnot, then probably adding a few useless leds to make your powerful card ALSO look cool is maybe a good idea because it will attract more buyers, and in turn that would mean that leds => power.