Bug Gradient HDR colors are much brighter than non-Gradient colors? (Bug?)

Here's something odd I noticed today. Maybe someone can explain why this is expected behavior, unless it's a bug.

I found that when using "Set Color", assigning a plain old HDR color gave my particles one color/intensity, while assigning a gradient HDR color resulted in much brighter colors, even when the gradient's color stops were identical to the plain old color. Here's the bit of the graph:



So the setup is that the gradient is using the same HDR color for both of its stop that the plain old color node is using. To me, this means that the color sampled at any point in the gradient should be completely identical to the plain old color in this particular case. But the results of the two nodes is very different.

Here's what this looks like with the plain old color:



And instead, here's what the same particle system looks like if I plug the gradient color into it:



It's massively brighter. I would have expected each particle to sample its current color from the gradient, but that the color would basically be constant, since the color is the same along the gradient.

Does this make sense to anyone? Is this a bug with gradient colors and HDR? Or is there a good reason for this? Note that things look identical between plain old color and gradient color as long as none of the values go into the HDR range. But once they're in HDR range, it's almost like the gradient is doubling/quadrupling the intensity.

 

This is VFX Graph 7.4, with HDRP 7.4.