Hardware Unboxed video about ray tracing, and whether it’s any good, and a follow up video about the performance cost, and whether it’s worth it. Basically, often no, sometimes yes.
I used to manually mod like this, but for a few years now I’ve pretty much just been using mod lists/packs.
For Bethesda RPGs (TES/Fallout), and a couple other games, you can use Wabbajack to auto-install a bunch of different lists, some of which have thousands of mods.
For other games you can usually use Vortex and Nexus collections, or in the case of Steam workshop, workshop collections.
If you want a good mod list for BG3, there’s Listonomicon.
I’m convinced RL 2 will come out before they upgrade it to UE5.