The adaptability is an essential part of why Shadows and Highlights (and other similar features such as Dehaze and Clarity) are so much more effective than older methods such as Tone Curve, so the adaptability cannot be “turned off” — that would effectively defeat the feature itself. The adaptive adjustments were designed for individual still images, so they don’t make any attempt to smooth out what might happen if they were to be applied to a sequence.
The solution for time lapses is to prioritize more traditional non-adaptive techniques, such as doing as much shadow and highlight adjustment as you can in the Tone Curve before using the adaptive adjustments. The Tone Curve, which goes back to the earliest versions of Photoshop, is simple, linear, and non-adaptive: Each pixel’s value is shifted by the value indicated by the curve for that tone level, regardless of image context. Not being able to adapt adjustments to image context limited the Tone Curve so much that new features like Shadows and Highlights had to be invented to provide better control without tedious manual masking. But there are still a few cases like time lapses where the Tone Curve is better than the newer features, so it’s a good thing Lightroom Classic keeps the Tone Curve around.
I use LRTimelapse with Lightroom Classic. One of the features of LRTimelapse is smoothing out inter-frame contrast flickering. But the developer of LRTimelapse does not advise relying on their anti-flicker feature to remove flicker from adaptive adjustments; instead he advises minimizing their use. That still means you can use adaptive adjustments, but first try to solve those problems using more traditional methods (e.g. Tone Curve), then add adaptive adjustments sparingly as a last resort.
Here is a very informative video on this subject from the LRTimelapse website:
Stop Lightroom from adding Contrast Flicker to your Timelapses
The video goes over which Develop module adjustments are adaptive, and which are not. That way you will know which adjustments you can focus on first for your heavy lifting, then keep the adaptive adjustments to a minimum so that any resulting contrast flicker is also kept to a minimum.
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