This reminds me very much of one of my favorite Disney videos that I showed my daughter long ago. It's this clip of four very talented cell animators out practicing their Art:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JK9uQNBDxQ
The whole thing is whimsical while also being very educating. Really glad that Disney is keeping this kind of stuff up.
Certain things are so grossly oversimplified, they are misleading.
For example, how does sorting rays following similar direction help? The history book analogy is appalling. It might give the misguided interpretation to a kid that it is always better to sort items - e.g. before summing a few numbers, may be sorting them is a good idea, or before map operations may be sorting them will ease the task for a computer, etc.
The big thing they were trying to get at is there are some clever tricks we can do to make these massive calculations more efficient.
They're probably alluding to Disney's Hyperion renderer[1]. Sorting rays helps with cache coherency.
[1] https://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/production...