What are these glowing ball lights on sticks called?

Almost certainly custom built. When a volunteer says 'the lighting guy handles that' that's usually code for some volunteer with a soldering iron and a controller running WLED, and those setups almost never come from a product you can order. The smooth breathing fades are exactly what WLED does by default with the right preset, so my bet is off-the-shelf parts assembled by hand. The good news is that the build isn't hard. The most common recipe is a short piece of conduit or rebar for the stake, a cheap frosted globe or lamp shade on top, and one or two addressable pixels inside for the glow. Some people buy pre-made diffused pixel balls from the holiday lighting suppliers that cater to the mega-tree crowd. Search for 'pixel ball light', 'LED dome pixel', or 'diffused pixel node' and skip the big box stores entirely. That solar junk is a totally different animal and will never sync or fade like what you saw.

The other route is a string of addressable bullets with the plastic ball diffusers sold for permanent holiday installs. Those already come weatherproofed on wire, so you just zip tie or epoxy each one into a globe and mount it on a stake. If you keep the controller in a weatherproof box at the end of the run, maintanence is basically zero after setup. For 40 feet of bed, figure on spacing them about 3 to 4 feet apart, so somewhere in the range of a dozen orbs. That's a small enough count that a single controller and one power supply handles it easily, and the wiring stays simple. One tip from my own yard: pick a globe with real frosted plastic, not clear plastic with a frosted coating, because the coating version shows hotspots right at the LED and ruins the soft look you're after.

Did basially this in my own beds a couple years back and yeah, the build it yourself route is fine, but don't overlook how much time the stakes take. Getting a bunch of rods to stand straight and weatherproof at the same height is honestly more fiddly than the wiring. I used dollar store solar light stakes as the base since they've allready got a ground spike, just tossed the solar part. Cheap and they don't rust out after one season.

Also set a schedule in the controller so they kick on around dusk on thier own, otherwise you'll be outside every evening fiddling with it.

Did a row of these along my front walk last fall and the power side was easier than I figured it would be. An old phone charger brick in a plastic project box ran the whole line since each pixel barely draws anything. The one gotcha for me was the data wire. Past a certain distance the far end of the row got flaky til I fed the signal fresh from the middle of the run instead of just chaining everything off the first orb. Also make drip loops at every connection so water can't wick down the wire into your joints. Learned that one the soggy way.

The power side of these setups is always where people trip up. Even if the individual LEDs draw only a small amount of current, running a single power lead all the way to the farthest orb can cause a drop in voltage over a distance. If you're planning on a big run, you need to plan for power distribution at the end, or even in the middle, to keep the colors bright. Also, I've learned that putting a fuse on the input power supply is just good old practice, even if the strip says it's totally safe. I remember when I set up a display in the yard, the farthest balls were looking noticeably dimmer than the ones right near the outlet. Once I split the power supply and fed it into seperate junction points further along the row, the whole display looked much more consistent.

Update: sounds like building it is the way to go then. One of you mentioned the far end of the data line acting up on longer runs, wich is exactly the kind of thing I would have hit blind. How do you actually fix that? Extra wire, some kind of booster, or just splitting the run into two shorter lines from the controller?