So "you need to have an internally consistent believable world" is only one available choice out of many. It is currently the most fashionable choice, and writers who are using it can fairly be evaluated on how they do with it. But it's not the only choice.

An “internally consistent believable world” is also many different things for many different stories.

Can we agree 'the rules of magic must be consistent, known, essentially scientific in the rigor and explained to the reader' is THE WAY like muesli is THE BREAKFAST. ie it's one option.

I can't help but agree, not least because so much F&SF doesn't adhere to that idea. You literally can't have Lovecraftian horror if you say things have to "make sense"; it's antithetical to the genre.

Internal consistency in a fantasy world is one of my very few hard rules about writing. But it’s only a rule for MY writing. There is no wrong way to write. BTW I recommend your Ancillary series like every day. Stunning worldbuilding. They should invent new awards for those books to win.

I can't believe in any world that doesn't contain huge inconsistencies and things that are different depending on whom you're talking to and what day it is

I like ‘internally consistent but never explained’ personally…and that doesn’t even mean the writer knows, just that stuff feels like it goes together, but still makes no sense. Scavenger’s Reign for example:)

This is one thing I appreciate about Jonathan Carroll. He’ll just throw dream logic at the page when it’s called for and it works fine.

And I think the fact that this particular *sort* of worldbuilding is just called "worldbuilding" makes discussing other options--or discussing the strengths and weaknesses of this particular sort of worldbuilding--very difficult.

Weirdly, ASOIAF failed this for my husband in the first book. Whores this and whores that and the king's whores, and someone getting set to the wall for... being a whore? Wait what?! He looked up to see if it was ever explained and since it wasn't, it bugged him too much to keep going

You've not just opened a can of nerd worms here, you've opened a pallet full of cases of nerd worms on an intergalactic freighter headed to a galaxy far far away where people in an advanced technological society fight with swords while riding giant sandworms.