There's been some efforts to use GPU ray tracing to bring some of it back, IIRC Call of Duty from a few years ago had it, but as you say it hasn't caught on and

There's been some efforts to use GPU ray tracing to bring some of it back, IIRC Call of Duty from a few years ago had it, but as you say it hasn't caught on and displaced 'good enough' audio. I also had a Vortex2 and it's not about requiring a high-end surround system, as I suspect even today there's still a significant amount of players with decent but not high-end audio. I was playing Quake3 with A3D before they patched it out with either basic stereo speakers or headphones and the placement was superb.