Light management in scenes

I wrote a novel at first but rather let me rephrase this into something compact for reading (hence the edit). 

 When creating a generic light management system for forward rendering (light lists per object, will do forward+ later), is it expected to actually create light sources for explosions and aoe effects that games can be rampant with nowadays? 

I can't imagine creating all the GPU-side resources on the fly for a lot of flaming debris, spells etc. would be healthy for FPS. I'm mostly asking about viability of this approach vs bloom or another post processing …