With ray tracing Nvidia made a new technology that breaks everyone's PC performance then they sold the solution to that broken performance as a card upgrade with better ray tracing hardware. Even though the Ray tracing doesn't necessarily look any better, just different, we now have to upgrade cards to solve the broken PC performance Nvidia caused themselves...
I think what parent is complaining about is the "Art Direction" rather than the technology itself, and I think I agree. Some of the feeling and mood been lost in the translation, sadly. I'm sure if they had some better art direction (maybe they didn't have a person from Valve to help with this?), it could have been a lot better in that regard, even with ray tracing and the rest.
