It’s a ton of knowledge , but not gatekept behind degrees or anything. Like web development, you can learn much of it by reading freely available documents, blog posts, and white papers. (Tho it’s much more math heavy. Mostly trig and very basic linalg)

There’s a famous “ray tracing in a weekend” book even.

Color spaces and PBR also isn’t some magic. It’s just math. You implement it in shaders and color space conversion functions.

It gets really hard when you try to optimize it, like you said with render farms. IMO synchronization in Vulkan (and other low low level graphics APIs) is the really difficult stuff.

But nothing that requires a PhD or whatever.

For the curious “Real Time Rendering” is a really great textbook all about modern rendering techniques