Sorry, but that article is pretty senseless.
First of all, ray tracing is considered a general term for algorithms based on, well, tracing rays. "Normal" ray tracing, which only handles direct light certainly falls into the category. So does Path Tracing, which adds an approximation for indirect lighting. So does Ray Marching, which also considers non-solid matter.
20 minutes ago, NikiTo said:
Now I often see ray tracing touted as a magic fix for rendering
It is a fix. Not to make an awesome game out of a shit game, but for exactly the features that he named. Reflections, refractions, hard shadows. All in realtime. That's the reason why we will see hybrid renderers for the next couple of years or decades, not pure ray tracers.
That being said, it's a first step towards more sophisticated algorithms such as path tracing, which relys on the same principles. Sending out huge amounts of rays. Running a lot of intersection routines. Hardware needs to be adjusted for that, which is starting to happen now.
29 minutes ago, NikiTo said:
but it’s no simulation of reality
That's just a stupid point. Of course we won't simulate photons. It's nothing but a waste of resources.
Quote
The crux of the problem is that with a path tracer you are locked into an all or nothing approach. If you turn down quality too much you get a grainy image, which you can use to preview but which is wholly unsuitable for production use
That's also not true. GI in games is often based on some form of path tracing. For example, Unity uses path tracing for their light mapper. That's why we have seen all those new denoising algorithms coming up the last couple of years, to make some form of path tracing feasible. Now, of course we're cheating, and more or less of the quality of a path traced image is lost through denoising. But it's still already some form of it.