So nice to see another person being that enthusiastic about ray tracing! I didn't do a comparable level of work in this field, but as a hobby this fascinates me a lot!

One common misconception is that ray tracing is computationally prohibitive. It was, but no longer so; it's a target within our reach, especially so when there's GPU with hardware acceleration for ray casting.

Many games use ray tracing for partial scene processing, and of course they all work in real time. My favourite example is Metro Exodus with ray traced global illumination, which works on last gen graphics hardware pretty well. Not all games use the technology efficiently, but the trend is already obvious: with accessible real time ray tracing rendering the scene will become a much easier task.

P.S. I used "ray tracing" when more accurately I should have used "path tracing", but I prefer to use a single term to encompass the whole technology with all its variants.