Comment by pornel

Advancements in lighting can help all games, not just AAA ones.

For example, Tiny Glade and Teardown have ray traced global illumination, which makes them look great with their own art style, rather than expensive hyper-realism.

But currently this is technically hard to pull off, and works only within certain constrained environments.

Devs are also constrained by the need to support multiple generations of GPUs. That's great from perspective of preventing e-waste and making games more accessible. But technically it means that assets/levels still have to be built with workarounds for rasterized lights and inaccurate shadows. Simply plugging in better lighting makes things look worse by exposing the workarounds, while also lacking polish for the new lighting system. This is why optional ray tracing effects are underwhelming.