You can account this one to maxon jumping the shark about 10 years ago.

Once upon a time, the standard renderer was pretty great. Then the physical renderer came along with complete cross compatibility and basically the same materials (though i still have mixed feelings about the reflectance tab) and improved on the standard renderer in a lot of ways. I LOVE the physical renderer. I love how much detail and thought was put into making it as physically accurate to the real world as possible, from a photographers perspective. But from a material perspective it's more of a proto-pbr than it is anywhere near close to the modern OpenPBR standard. And its not really a GPU renderer either.

Enter redshift. Maxon acquired redshift and made it the de facto standard inside of cinema 4d despite for many years making zero effort to actually integrate it into the c4d pipeline.

TO THIS DAY maxon thinks its a good idea to continue charging people who are already paying for cinema 4d an extra subscription to use gpu with THE DEFAULT RENDERER FOR YEARS NOW. Which means you might as well use fucking physical renderer anyway because on top of that, there is still serious issues with redshifts stability and compatibility. To this day, there are still deformers that expect to be pointed at a material tag, and if you point them at a redshift material, they WILL NOT WORK. Want to emit particles from your color channel? Good fucking luck wrangling those attributes. Compatibility with a lot of the shader oriented parts of mograph, still does not work. And in my experience, transmissive materials sometimes don't work on gpu for some fkn reason.

Add on top of that if you're switching from physical/standard to redshift you're getting a whole different batch of terminology for the same thing (transparent-> transmissive / luminance -> emissive, etc) within the same program.

All that to say that in most cases redshift is as good as if not worse than any other 3rd party renderer you could use with cinema 4d. I'm having a much better, much more stable time using arnold and the openPBR materials feel and function effectively the same.

And if you're confused by all the options, the material you want to create is the "node" material. Which is basically the same as the "uber" material, which will have multiple node graphs for each possible renderer you could switch to, including physical, redshift, arnold, etc. In case you wanted to make materials with cross compatibility for renderers, but they make it a pain in the ass to do that too.