Everything you see in games are hacks to simulate ray traycing.
Of you don’t want ray traycing...you have to give up on new games...the devs want RT...Microsoft has provided the DX12 DXR API...time to sell your gaming PC.
Oh I want ray tracing, but neither the software or hardware is ready. I learned the lesson the hard way to never buy something for its future potential, only for what it does now as way too often that promise is either partially delivered or not delivered at all. Right now we have some reflections you have to pause the game to look at and see if they're ray traced, and that's about it. That's not even what I'd consider partially delivered.