highlight reconstruction with the new modes (guided laplacians in v4, and even more the new inpaint opposed and segmentation based in 4.1) gives good enough results, especially with later desaturation performed by filmic or sigmoid.
And filmic has no clear idea of ‘white’, at least not v6. It turned an extremely bright, but also very saturated (false colour, due to clipping) Sun disk into dark purple.
Magenta highlights vs raw clipping indicator vs filmic white level - #3 by kofa, and the responses below it.