Hello from the future. Yeah this is still comically broken. If I open the example VR scene and try to launch it, it starts compiling 3000 shaders (I’d guess from the MobileStarterContent folder that is part of the project). It takes forever, but none of those shaders are actually used!
They should clearly be compiled lazily when needed. Doing everything up-front is insane. Very surprised they haven’t fixed this 3 years later. Just Google “unreal shader slow” to see how much of a problem it is. A disappointing number of replies are people thinking that this is a good design.