Hi Narayanan and a warm welcome to the Wildlife forum.
Firstly there is never a
'Lame question' and often you may feel it's a lame or silly question, but there could be five other folk wanting to know the same answer, so never be afraid to ask.
OK, this is my take....
Irrespective whether you shoot DSLR or Mirrorless you basically want to capture as much data in shot as possible without clipping both the Blacks or Whites. By maximising the data the better it is to manipulate the file, therefore you want to Expose to the right (ETTR) until you start to see any blinkies in the capture. If you do, then simply drop your ISO, Exposure or SS by a third, generally that resolves it. However, those blinkies could be highlights in water, the sun or something that you just cannot avoid and so you just let it go. It's far better to have a bright/thin image to start with as you know, you can always bring everything back because you have correctly exposed for the image, retaining data. It's when you under expose and have to
'lift' lighten the image your problems start, because you then import greater noise within the Darks/Shadows and all your lovely detail is in the mid tones.
Now, if you use Lr or Ps there is only a certain amount it can render and so
'may indicate' blown HL's not true, simply because most cameras under expose, even though it shows a perfect exposure, this is why I like to use on occasion RD, it shows the real exposure. I had a shot of a lion and along the front paw Lr said the HL's were blown, not true, I just whipped it across into another software and the data was all there, no blown HL's. Yes there are really good Raw converters which are free, but tend to be extremely complicated to use and take a great deal of time to understand and deploy.
Basically, get the best exposure you can, less Post Production, the better the file/image will look, but also avoid hefty cropping too. Hope this helps and perhaps at some point you can share some wildlife images too.
Take a moment to read this too, it might be of far greater value.
Cheers
Steve