Firstly, many thanks to the Cesium team on the 1.37 release. It solves the flicker problem i posted before.
One approach is to increase the ambient color in the tileset. I’m pretty sure the New York demo is using an ambient color of (0.5, 0.5, 0.5). Rather than modifying the tileset another way would be to edit the code to increase the brightness of the shading computation:
var minimumLighting = optimizeForCesium ? 0.2 : 0.0;
could instead be
var minimumLighting = optimizeForCesium ? 0.5 : 0.0;