Blender developers are looking at making use of Vulkan ray queries in the future and as a first step toward that came up with a proof of concept implementation to replace workbench shadows with a ray query implementation.
This helped the Blender developers gain more insight into this Vulkan ray-tracing capability for performing ray geometry intersection tests directly within any shader stage as an alternative to Vulkan's ray-tracing pipelines.
This Vulkan ray query proof of concept was noted within the latest viewport and EEVEE meeting .
The proof of concept ray queries implementation can be found within this pull request .