Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.
Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.
Ray tracing also doesn’t replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.
The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.
The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.
The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia’s money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.
I’m not a graphics engineer so I only have cursory knowledge of the topic.
The biggest benefits that ray tracing brings is the accuracy of lighting your scenes and being able to forego the “tricks” that you mentioned. These are almost always going to be screen-space lighting techniques and effects e.g. reflections (SSR) and ambient occlusion (SSAO).
Unfortunately, the bad news is that you’d still need to understand the 3D math and shader knowledge regardless of whether you can take advantage of ray tracing or not. The good news is there are numerous game engines and resources out there to help!
Hope you make something cool from the hobby!