I never said realistic? Maybe read before you type?
Below you can see what AC shadows look like without RT. The devs literally tell us that in order for them to bake in AC unity caliber indirect lighting for all the weather, season and day night scenarios, it wouldve required 1.9 terabytes of data. Plus literally 2 years of baking in. So they went with a much lower fidelity baked lighting solution that isnt even as good as their first game last gen. So yeah, if you want graphics that are worse than last gen then continue stanning for baked lighting solutions in these massive games.
And yes, PBR materials get enhanced by better lighting solutions since they are well physical based. Better light reflections, light bounces, proper shadowing and other light properties make the materials look like they should.
Realtime GI is realtime lighting. Ray tracing is realtime lighting. It's just more accurate than software based solutions we see in Software Lumen, KCD2, Starfield, Forza and other games with realtime GI. It's not something new. it's something devs wanted to add last gen. You can look up the Fable 2015 demos.
Hilarious of you to state that UE5 started this trend even though starfield, a game in development since 2015 has it. Even though Avatar that started development in 2017 had it. Even though KCD2 which started development in 2018 had it. Forza which started development in 2017. Dead Space uses realtime GI instead of baked GI and that started development in 2018. Hell, Crytek released a Software RT demo in 2019. A full year before Lumen was revealed and 3 years before UE5 was released. Spearheaded my ass. Everyone from EA to Bethesda, Turn10, Ubisoft Massive, Ubisoft Montreal, Rockstar and ID Software are moving away from baked GI but Kevboard thinks they are all retarded. A big LOL