Placing lighting, RT or otherwise isn't as simple as just placing the light. You still have decide the light type (spot, directional, point, ect), light color, and the many other light properties. Certain lights will disperse photons in a specific direction with a very sharp cutoff while others will disperse them around the lighting fixture. More realistic light propagation simulation ala RT doesn't change these requirements. You are still going to want to adjust these parameters regardless of whether you are using RT or rasterized lighting. In addition, some devs may want to bake lighting when fully dynamic lighting isn't required and other times they will need to use different types of reflections (aside from SSR, UE5 supports cheaper reflection captures) because having a ton of RT reflections isn't remotely feasible. Devs are going to use a gambit of reflection types according to their requirements including RT, SSR, and reflection captures (which includes planar, box, ect).
You may have misunderstood what they said, implementing RT lighting over rasterized lighting might be easy because you've already done most of the work setting the correct lighting properties but implementing RT lighting does not absolove you of doing that work in the first place. In addition you may still have to go through and adjust lighting parameters for ideal visibility under RT. I've noticed in many RT enabled games the devs don't do this and often text or objects that are supposed to be visible are harder to see. If the dev you talked to really did think that you can simply place a generic light source throughout their entire game without editing it's properties then I very much doubt they were much of a dev to begin with.
Star Wars outlaws having RT on by default doesn't mean the game doesn't use rasterization (it does, hence why you get ok performance on cards like the 1080 Ti). It also uses hybrid RT, so a portion of the work is done on tradition shader cores.
I'm sure we'll move to RT only at some point but people have been saying "once mid tier hardware is capable of it" since the 2000 series (heck there were even some bold individuals claiming mid tier 2000 series cards were it already) and here we are, mid-tier GPUs now costing $700 USD and requiring upscaling just to run modern games with RT enabled at a decent frame-rate. The progress has been less than impressive.
It's not even the first time I've heard someone say 'nice mid-tier hardware is capable of RT well get RT only games'. That was 6 years ago now and we are still waiting. I'd MUCH rather have ray-traced sound, much less resource intensive and extremely beneficial. Even better, dynamically generate sounds based on how sound propogation work. Every pot should make a different sound based on the weapon hitting it, where it hits it, ect. Literally anything other than graphics for once. Decent AI for example sure would be nice. Modern AAA games are as wide as an ocean and as shallow as a puddle.