The Storm hydra delegate requests this property and USD will trace, per the bug report, if it is not present. This started happening with the library update for 4.4 which is odd. The code[1] in Storm has existed forever and so has the USD trace for requesting data from an empty VtValue. [1] https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD/blame/release/pxr/imaging/hdSt/light.cpp#L305 Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/143746