Hi im curious to know what the use cases for this baked workflow are in respect to baking the whole scene to textures, that is what uses are there for it in an animation pipeline and also any other circumstances that you know this technique can be put to good use for. Thanks.
The best example off the top of my head is for realtime application, like a game or VR. If you setup a 100% realistic environment with Cycles then bake everything down to a texture map for your geometry, in your game or VR situation you would be able to walk/navigate around that 100% real environment for very little resource cost (no realtime shadows or lighting).
Of course that would be a static situation, meaning the illusion would fall apart if you wanted to add shadows or real lighting. But still I think it's an effective option for very realistic lighting in a realtime application for very cheap. And of course there's a spectrum for how much the effect is used. It could be combined with dynamic lighting if used wisely.
Anyway, hope that clarifies a bit.