I am assuming you are both talking about the comparisons in the article? They are mostly terrible examples of path tracing, as they just took the original map

I am assuming you are both talking about the comparisons in the article? They are mostly terrible examples of path tracing, as they just took the original map files with the lights authored for the original renderer, erased the baked lighting, and run the new renderer with those lights. So it's not that game designers are not used to lighting for path tracing, it's just that nobody designed it. Heck, even porting maps between two versions of the same lineage of offline raytracer can result in ridiculously different outputs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JkRwPWnL_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JkRwPWnL_c Among other things, these games did not have high dynamic range lighting at all, so light data can only ever make the picture darker than the base textures. (Think of it as a layer set to "multiply" blend mode in a photo editor) So making a light brighter at some point wouldn't make things look any closer to white, just making the falloff sharper. So most lights were authored to look good in the renderer, not make any actual physical sense, as you said. That said, this approach of "just swap out the renderer" could work much better for games that work on a physically-based rasteriser workflow (mostly newer stuff, like from around 2015 and onward), because they mostly already use compliant and realistic light sources, and the baked lights and rasterisation are "merely" for performance. (a.k.a. being a game and not a 2-day-per-frame art installation) If you want to see a ray-tracing-native game, take a look at Teardown (https://www.teardowngame.com/ https://www.teardowngame.com/), it does not exhibit any of the "chiaroscuro" described, and has perfectly cromulent lighting.