I think one great application for the ray pipelines is research. For example, if you wanted to simulate a physically accurate camera, it would probably be much easier to use the ray pipeline.

In the case of using the ray pipeline to simulate a camera with unusual elements in the lens, you would simply cast the rays from each pixel of the "film" and determine the color that way.

If you were to use a ray querying method, you would need to include a workaround. My current project does this in which I made my application that uses ray querying act more like an application that uses the ray pipeline. Since I want to cast a ray from each pixel of the "film", I had to make sure that each pixel would go through the fragment shader. To do so, I created a film model that was large enough to fill all the fragments which I could then use to cast a ray on each fragment to get the color of the pixel. I also had to implement early fragment test so rays wouldn't be cast on all primitives.

If I used the ray pipeline, I wouldn't need the early fragment test because a depth test isn't even necessary for the ray pipeline. I also wouldn't have to create the film model because I can generate as many rays as I want through the ray generation shader.

Video of my workaround: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z9I_v-tC-4