There are probably a few leaps and connections your making that you shouldn't be.
a) there are hundreds of games released each year, and only a fraction of the games can ship with graphical fidelity that can even approximate closely to ray traced AO/GI/shadows. So by definition, if we're seeing mods in which people can release for games manned by a single person and output better lighting and shadows, then, the agreement that it's easier woudl be justified at least with respect to costs, time, labour, and talent required to produce those visuals.
b) With respect to your, if DXR was so simple why wouldn't Tomb Raider already have it yet: that's a loaded question that can have a variety of reasons that increase the complexity of why that patch hasn't shipped yet. For something like BFV, perhaps the priority was there because sales for the title was being charted as weak, so anything they could do further to get more sales might have been the plan. The case for Tomb Raider is long done - if they reached targets already, where does the incentive to dedicate a lot of resources to this come from? SOTR is coming onto Xbox Game Pass, I mean, that's a pretty good sign of where it needs to go to continue to obtain marginal profits.
c) QB is just one example. We could look at a variety of curated titles and see great baked GI titles. But those titles still pale in comparison to a completed solution. I get your from the VFX industry and that there are a lot of parallels between the 2 industries. But the biggest difference between the two is that in video games, things have to look good from every single angle and distance. In VFX, the camera is constrained, you can do all sorts of things to make the lighting right before you bake it for that one camera setup. And when you're looking to solve for 'every single angle and distance', even with the technology we have today, we still fall short of making everything look good everywhere, there's a very specific reason why curated adventure titles, tend to look better than other open world ones, and it has largely to do with constraint.
So I want to be clear, I'm not saying your'e wrong. But a lot of techniques in rasterization/compute/sdf/voxels/vpl are there to get closer and closer to real time RT. Some at heavy computational costs, others with heavy limitations, and others with heavy drawbacks; and DXR is likely to have some of those problems too, but we're at the point now where the intersection of effort, computational power, and costs are converging such that hybrid RT is a viable strategy for games to tackle should they wish to, especially so if hardware can accelerate that process.
