As a lighting artist working in the entertainment industry, I strongly disagree with that statement. Who is “no one” in this case if not professionals like me?
To expound further, is the purpose of the render engine to serve humans or to be completely correct in an idyllic white tower? If it is indeed built for humans, it would be helpful to cooperate a bit and work with tools that lighting artists have to use in the real world, which are primarily photometric-based measurement devices.
In a previous post I linked a huge number of modern render engines, both offline and real-time, implementing photometric features. To make a ridiculous statement like “no one wants this” strikes me as bizarre and unnecessarily dismissive.
Lastly, everything in render engines is not representative of reality to some degree, whether it’s the fact that we’re limited to geometric optics, BxDFs that only coursely simulate microgeometry and transmission, or what have you. Let’s not draw arbitrary lines in the sand of what is sane to approximate and what isn’t.