Religion in Exalted is garbage and there is a very simple explanation for that, or several rather.
First of all, Exalted is a hodgepodge; there is no consistent aesthetic or inspiration to Exalted at all beyond overarching themes such as its opinion on violence and power. This also means that there is no consistent approach to divinity, and it is approached in the sort of milquetoast fantasy-esque approach that simply names gods as all that matters, maybe remembering that they have priests and perhaps even a ritual. There has not been any significant study of historical religion and cultic organization that permits Exalted to rise above the disappointing morass of fantasy religions, other than perhaps the Immaculate Faith, and even that has its blunders and flaws. Therefore, Exalted breaks its central thesis statement of exploring hierarchies, power and consequences and asking critical questions, when the subject comes to religion, because Exalted has created a situation that makes it incapable of asking any serious questions with regards to how people engage with religion and worship, other than the most basic and superficial question that any teenager of the age of 18, subscribed to a Youtube skeptic, could ask himself, and likely with more enthusiasm. Gods in Exalted lack in identity, consistency and coolness. Despite having an arguably more restrained and strong identity, I have seen more interesting variation and new stuff be done with Malfeas and other Yozis than I have ever seen for gods.
Secondly, gods in Exalted are presented in isolation. There is a monolithic celestial bureaucracy, which is only detailed in its bureaucratic aspects; whether you like those aspects or not does not matter, what matters is that it is all there is. Terrestrial courts are often either unsatisfactory or disappointing, often unconnected to local power structures, completely detached from ritual and seem to more or less exist for the sole purpose of being arrogant fuckheads that your Exalt can humiliate in a gratuitous show of power. There is no engagement with local tradition at all, nor is there any attempt to provide so. Similarly, Exalted does not know, as a game, anything about how important ritual and cultic organization is to the very kind of cultures that Exalted wants to portray, neither does it seem to care much for how important religion and gods are to most actual people. In this, it commits the common fantasy sin of portraying everyone who isn't a Dedicated Religious Guy as effectively unbelieving in all regards except for being more superstitious than a modern Western person. Exalted does absolve itself slightly here, by having that "superstition" have some grounding in the reality they live in, rather than simply portraying them as stupid, which is cool and nice of Exalted.
Thirdly, Exalted cares about the parts of religion that only nerds care about; the gods and the stories. The cool myths and stories about how mythical figures acted in the past, did this or did that, the funny anecdotes and the Big Names among the gods. It does not concern itself with daily ritual, with prayers and with local temples; this is another reason the Immaculate Faith comes off as better. These kinds of things actually possess a modicum of detail, because the Immaculate Faith does not have any Big Name gods that can distract from the parts of faith that actually matter to its believers. Similarly, as a result of being a religion that the game is insistent on being definitively untrue, the Immaculate Faith is a lot more interwoven with power structures and examined than other religions are, simply out of the fact that the game actually needs to detail the religion, rather than distract with fire and light and big shows, by listing off the Cool Gods. Did it never struck you as weird that despite being the City of Thousand Gods, Great Forks has not a single named cult to itself in all of Exalted's canon?
Fourthly and finally Exalted was originally written at a time that was very interested in being cynical about religion, and especially the big organized religions, but by people without significant knowledge about actual religion except for some variations of American Christianity. Therefore, it is largely written cynically unexamined without any particular exploration of how these kinds of beliefs impact people's lives. Gods are autocratic bureaucrats who should be doing their jobs, ancestor worship is practically nonexistent and the biggest religion in the world has a hierarchy modeled off Catholicism and is explicitly untrue as the only in the entire setting. In its pursuit of cynical examination of that which usually goes unexamined, Exalted has traded one kind of ignorance for another kind.
Third Edition is taking another approach, which we don't know much about yet, but the Touman Clans, Wanasaan exorcists, Sisterhood of Pearls, Pure Way, Skandhar-Bhal show that it is likely to be less absolutely dismissive of faith than previous editions, for which I am grateful.
