just to make things clear(er), exposure can matter when we photograph the negatives. Overexposing the camera scan can help get cleaner bright areas like clouds in the sky - as long as the highlights don’t clip. Nevertheless, I find NLP to be fairly tolerant to exposure.
Exposure of the original negative is what it is and cannot be changed. NLP will make best use of it and Nate gave us useful hints in this post: Terrible Colour