alt Hacker News+1 for twinkly lights. I've had some WS2801s that are about a decade old from Aliexpress for ages. This time lighting the tree, discovered quite a few scorch marks and melted insulation. Twinkly lights were 66% off locally, so gave 'em a go. They're still RGB, but blend into the tree a fair bit better. The LED spatial mapping stuff kinda works - it's not perfect, but gives you enough to be able to have decent fades top to bottom and side to side.
I have no intention of swapping to Twinkly for my normal accent lighting around the house - btf-lighting.com + WLED is still your friend for that.
Yeah the Twinkly stuff is crazy. I bought some for my wife, who is a major Christmas decor-head, a couple years back. She throws those things on the tree, uses the app to do the mapping, and the animations are really impressive. Very much like what you see on the website.