I think COVID is partially to blame here too. Specifically with the over hiring. A lot of companies took on too many people with the influx of cash caused by everyone staying home and playing games and when the market went back to level and everyone went back to work companies were left holding the bag for a bunch of employees that they realistically couldn’t support and probably shouldn’t have hired.

While this functionality is proprietary to Nvidia ray tracing isn’t and since RTX is just nvidia’s brand of ray tracing your statement of RTX being proprietary isn’t wholly accurate.