There's been some efforts to use GPU ray tracing to bring some of it back, IIRC Call of Duty from a few years ago had it, but as you say it hasn't caught on and displaced 'good enough' audio.

I also had a Vortex2 and it's not about requiring a high-end surround system, as I suspect even today there's still a significant amount of players with decent but not high-end audio. I was playing Quake3 with A3D before they patched it out with either basic stereo speakers or headphones and the placement was superb.

We've been using Microsoft's Triton[0] for a few years now on Call of Duty.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-tri...

I think there aren't enough folks (including me) with sophisticated enough speaker setups to take advantage of it, limiting the market.

There's only so much you can do with just a left and right speaker and MAYBE a sub.

That said, it does seem like there's new interest in spatial audio, so we'll see. Maybe with some spatial audio headphones, and especially if they add head-tracking so that a sound to your left moves relative to your head (and stationary relative to your body) as you turn your head to face it.