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Techniques used to create realism with rasterization (e.g. normal mapping; shadow mapping; screen-space anti-aliasing) are still simulations of optics, just not entirely faithful ones.

Generating visuals with an autoencoder, albeit hinted by noisy physically-based raytracing, is not an optical technique; detail is generated from a visual statistical model, not an optical simulation.

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> noisy physically-based raytracing...detail generated from a visual statistical model

That is an optical simulation :)

The raytracing is, but you don't see the result of the raytracing, you see the output of a neural network inventing detail based on higher definition training data. It's like seeing some blurry dots through a microscope, then drawing a sketch of detailed cells, based on your memory of pictures you've seen. The microscope is an optical system, but the sketch is the result of memory and style transfer, not simulation of optics. Hypothetically, you could have no understanding of the behaviour of light in producing the detailed sketch.

I think the success of deep learning is quite unfortunate. There are a lot of areas where "throw an ANN at it" has become a go-to even though they're basically inscrutable blackboxes with minimal theoretical guarantees.

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