Which of today’s real-time demos or games are you thinking of? The trend over time toward physically based rendering over the last 40 years has been pretty clear and absolute, and your claim is failing to capture that fact. While it’s a little sus to frame all real time graphics programmers has having the same goals, whatever ‘ethos’ does exist in common across all graphics programmers, history demonstrates that it includes the goal to increase physical realism, which I would call reducing the hacking/cheating. Wouldn’t you? Today we have multiple AAA games on the market with path traced global illumination and physically based materials.