There might be a good reason for this. Raster effects were already really good in newer games, and ray tracing could only improve on that high bar. It’s filling in details that are barely noticeable, but creap ever so slightly closer to photorealism.
Old games start from a low bar, so ray tracing has dramatic improvement.
I think Gothic 3 had a realistic lightning mod, but they had to cheat because the company made the buildings so they looked good with the original lightning.
So, yeah, does not always work.