Global Illumination alternatives

I don’t understand why are people talking about “biggest selling point” etc. in relation to SVOGI/VXGI.

First of all, if you think the biggest selling point of UE4 is/was SVOGI, you are either incredibly ignorant or simply dishonest.
Second, you do realize that SVOGI is an extremely resource intensive technique and VXGI requires hardware support (you can use it ONLY on 980 and 970 cards). That means it’s unusable for 95% of the PC market. And no, you can’t just make it look less appealing on weak systems, it has a high level of baseline performance it needs or it doesn’t work properly.