> Raymarching is a raytracing technique…

Did you mean ‘raymarching is a technique…’? Otherwise you’re somewhat contradicting the first sentence, and also ray marching and ray tracing are two different techniques, which is what you’re trying to say, right?

Raymarching can be polygon based, if you want. It’s not usually on ShaderToy, but there’s no technical reason or rule against raymarching polygons. And use of Monte Carlo with ray tracing doesn’t necessarily imply path tracing, FWIW.

Sorry, let me clarify, the terms are used imprecisely.

Some people use "raytracing" only for the ray intersection technique, but some people (me included, in the post above) consider it an umbrella term and raymarching, path tracing, etc. only as specific techniques of raytracing.

So what I meant is "'raymarching' is not 'raytracing in shaders' but just a technique of raytracing, in shaders or not".

I was not correcting OP, just adding clarifications on top.

> Raymarching can be polygon based, if you want

But not polygon-intersection-based, it'd still be a SDF (to an implicit polygon).