While I don't disagree, SDFs in specific have the nice property in that you can converge on the surface much quicker than in standard ray-marching which has a v

While I don't disagree, SDFs in specific have the nice property in that you can converge on the surface much quicker than in standard ray-marching which has a very significant impact on performance, which is why given many scenes, SDF ray-marching can be much less expensive than the alternatives.