I believe nVidia just wanted a tool to present their performance to non-gamers, particularly designers, CGI artists, etc.. in the best way possible and under their control.
A pure real-time engine stripped of game making ability, always with day one support of their latest CUDA, Tensor cores, DLSS,...
How much it is/stays a marketing tool or be actually adopted as industry tool is debatable. It has big overlap with other tools obviously, like Marmoset, Unreal Engine, or even GPU path-tracers.
Lot of tools lately don't fit into neat boxes.