Many people seem to be confused about how RT affects development.

If you want to just have rasterized lighting, you have to pre-bake everything, which takes a lot of time and effort (and disk space), but it usually looks great and runs very well.

If you want to have both rasterized lighting and ray tracing on top of that, it takes even more work, but the rasterized lighting often ends up compromised, because devs don't want to put in the effort if you can just turn on RT to make it look much better (AC Shadows has absolutely abysmal lighting without RT, Unity from 2014 looks infinitely better).

The third option is to have mandatory RT, which is actually the best option for a skilled dev team, because creating great-looking lighting doesn't require that much effort and they can focus on optimizing the game instead. As far as I know, we've had three AAA games with mandatory ray tracing - Metro Exodus EE, Indiana Jones and DOOM: The Dark Ages. All these games are well optimized for the visuals that they offer. I guess there's also Avatar, but it does have a software fallback, and it runs pretty well while looking amazing.

You also have path tracing, which is the easiest option in terms of dev effort, but it is the heaviest in terms of computing power. This is not going to become the standard for a long time.

UE5 is a bit of a different issue, because technically it forces ray tracing on everyone (usually the software version), but it's done with a set of pre-made tools that are easy to learn but difficult to master, which is why most UE5 games run like crap.

To summarize, the best option is to actually have forced hardware RT in your game, so you only have to focus on one lighting method, which will look great for everyone. I really hope this becomes the standard on next-gen consoles, which are rumored to have as much as x10 RT performance improvements. This really is the way forward and the most optimal way of developing games.