Control and Resident Evil 2 Remake still look incredible and run well on fairly inexpensive hardware today. We don't need globally illuminated Unreal Engine 5 games with individually modeled nostril hairs on each character that require graphics cards with prices in the three digit range
Graphics should just be kept at late PS4 level for the foreseeable future to keep games as accessible as possible
As far as I know, modern games use a lot of third party assets for crates and barrels and rocks (like Quixel and stuff) and even libraries of materials used for creating composite textures (like in Substance which I think is an Adobe thing now). So there's a lot of libraries for high quality resources locked behind enterprise grade paywalls.
As for ray tracing...ray traced global illumination, as I understand it, is very expensive but kind of has a fixed cost, and increasing the complexity of the scene doesn't really increase the cost of calculating the lighting past the baseline until you crank up the number of samples or number of bounces. Also, it saves a fair bit of work because if you can fully commit to RTGI, it's all physically based and behaves realistically and you don't have to do weird hacks and tricks anymore to try to fake realistic lighting.
Nah, I want it back like in the hl1 days where everyone was just straight ripping and reusing everything. Those were fun days.
It hurts how the Far Cry series could be good with all the stuff they re-use and copy-paste. But they use those resources for evil.