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The actual representation is using voxels to index a spherical harmonic coding of scene detail (I think), and that includes transparency so the novel view synthesis accretes light along the ray length. This lets it represent transparency and other lighting effects that aren't possible with simple photogrammetry.

It seems to be a faster way of calculating differentiable volumetric geometry from a scene (whether the input is computer-generated or captured from the real world). I didn't get it at all until I explored the linked NeRF site first.

No, AFAICT it's actually building a representation of a more detailed ray-traced 3D geometry in a way that can be rendered real time from any angle and with realistic lighting

Per the paper it's not quite real time (15 fps), and they suggest converting to a different representation (PlenOctrees) for real time.

But yes, it's far more realistic than your simple mesh-and-texture; the video shows it handles reflections and transparency. When NeRF came out (~2020?) it was a major step forward in light field quality and this technique appears to maintain that quality.