apart from games going from 2k to 4k to 8k, there hasn't been any noticeable improvement in realism in the past 10 years. ray tracing if enabled looks nice but that's pretty much the height of it, characters look just as janky as they did 10 years ago.

I feel the primary reason are the consoles, game devs can't push the boundaries as most consoles are around 5-6 years behind gaming PCs.

I think your comment is wrong and perhaps speaks to your own visual senses than any factual effect.

There’s been so many advancements in the last ten years outside of raytracing. Better character motion, better character AI, spatial audio, audio materials, speech matching just off the top of my head.

Every single thing about games has gotten noticeably better for realism.

One only needs to watch a Digital Foundry video or a GDC talk to see the big uplifts.

10 years is a long time too and spans all the way back to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. So your comment is nonsensical at best

the only advancement I know of which got close to be implemented in games is https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation (I think Sebastian worked with EA or some other big company at some point) - still haven't played anything using this though