[jasonwatkinspdx]

I'm sorry but there is a pronounced industry trend exactly against what you argue. Physically based rendering is winning out almost everywhere. A straightforward path tracer is capable of simulating nearly all the physics of light to any desired degree of fidelity. Part of why it's won out is that it's actually far simpler for artists to work in terms of real world material concepts vs tuning abstract parameters in fake models that can be coerced into to looking real. Eg "dusty metal with this albedo map" vs maps for parameters in some mutilated and extended phong shader.

[james4k]

Physically-based rendering has little to do with global illumination, and is only really about the BRDF [1] used for computing the final pixel color based on a number of inputs for that point in space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...

[MrScruff]

Well it's pretty hard to do PBR outside of a path tracer since energy conservation is a key concept.