>>714371407Baked lighting is good actually
You get 99% of the effects of global illumination and path tracing with 1% of the performance required.
The only downside is that it isn't dynamic, but you can cover up the lack of dynamism with partial global illumination effects. The combo of mostly baked but some dynamic lighting is what every good looking and good running game does.
Every game where the devs are retards and opt to 'just let the engine handle it' the game ends up a shitpile of spaghetti code, with default implementations that hurt performance, and lazy design where 1/10th more effort could've made something beautiful AND performant but they just couldn't be assed or were too stupid (jeets and women) to do it.