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.