they haven’t done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing

Unreal Engine's Lumen (and equivalents in other engines like Cryengine) made 'full' RTX obsolete. I can look at random lighting in Satisfactory that looks like modded Cyberpunk 2077 now. Even full path tracing in 2077 (which runs at a slideshow for me, but I tested experimentally) is just... not really worth it, with everything the performance budget GI saves could be used for instead.

So there's that, and that's a pretty cool software innovation.

Honestly that's where the neat stuff is now; outside the huge companies. Especially in software.