Lights the whole scene with one environment map.
Holds an equirectangular map, authored by its TEX children, and registers it with the scene. Every material whose environmentMode is AUTO or GLOBAL then lights and reflects from it, with no wire to run per material: dropping this node into a scene gives every untouched surface an environment at once. A material that has its own envMap keeps it under AUTO, so nothing already authored changes look.
Only one environment can be active. If a second one reaches the scene the first wins and the others report an error, rather than one being picked silently.
The map wants prefiltering, so set the tex node's mipmapsFilter to EnvironmentGGX: that is what lets a rough surface read the environment blurred and a polished one read it sharp.
For look-dev balls, a mirror one and a matte grey one that read the map and the light it casts, add an environmentHelper node. It is built out of nodes you can open and edit, so you can restyle a ball, move the pair apart or add a third, and it shows whichever environment actually won.
Scenes you can open in the editor that teach this node.
This page is generated from the engine, so it describes the release you can download. The same text
is in the editor's Help panel next to the node itself.