The feature is there to improve the look of the textures that are affected by said feature. And like every other feature in the game, it can be turned off if you don’t want it or your system can’t handle it. For OS X it’s currently moot anyway since no supported GPU has RT hardware on it thanks to Apple blocking nVidia from making drivers. AMD hasn’t released its RDNA2 cards yet, so no support for RT with Team Red yet.
And even if RT is just shadows currently, that isn’t the only aspect intended in the future, I can assure you. Just like a lot of other bleeding edge features, it’ll likely be enabled bit by bit as the patches roll in. WoW isn’t in a vaccuum all by itself and does evolve over time. It’s a double edged sword actually, since even though it gives the platform team more knobs to turn, on the OS X side it also means it makes it that much harder for them to maintain prior OS support for folks like myself that currently need such to play.
I’m glad WoW is evolving still. Stagnation leads to lack of innovation. Despite the hiccups the Mac side has face over the last few years, nobody can say Blizzard’s platform team hasn’t done their best to make things work for as many people as possible. Sure, my problem didn’t get real attention until just recently, but outside of the forced reliance on Apple to fix bugs submitted via Radar, I can’t say I haven’t seen Blizzard really attempt to keep things moving.
I wish nVidia could still put out drivers for OS X. I’d sell my kidney to get that 3090 ASAP (as long as it’s from EVGA of course) just so I could try out the new features and give feedback on them. But hey, at least I’m getting a chance to potentially return to the game and get to playing it again and other players are getting new shinies to try out. Someone else getting to try out ray tracing isn’t going to hurt me one bit. That’s the beauty of WoW - so many knobs and switches to play with that you can almost always make it into what you want.
It could be worse - WoW could take up nearly 200 GB of space like a fully installed modern Call of Duty game. 