Ray Tracing doesn't require new hardware to work though, the RT Cores in Turing just accelerate that workload. The price premium comes from the fact that these features take die space.
The 2060 is only comparable to the 1060 in name only, die size, cuda count, etc. are all very different. Again, if a GPU isn't price competitive, don't buy it. If you don't like a feature or you feel it impacts performance too much, don't use it. AMD now has alternatives without any RT for the 2060 to 2070 segment.
Like I said before, someone had to do it first. For better or worse there's a considerable install base now with accelerated Ray Tracing, which means more developers will start using the feature and we might actually get some good implementations.