You are not alone in feeling it's overblown.

Well-done ray tracing can be beautiful, but realistically, it doesn't matter to me. I'm not Narcissus; I don't play games to stare at my reflection in a puddle. My time and attention are almost entirely devoted to things that move too fast for ray tracing to matter, or reading text, or the geometry of a scene as I plan my approach to whatever I'm about to do.

If all other things were equal, I would gladly take the extra eye candy. But to me, it's not worth paying significantly more money for real-time ray tracing hardware and higher electricity bills.

Please wake me up in ten years or so, when every GPU does it well without measurably increasing power draw.