I am sorry, but that is just so ignorant thing to say for many reasons.
1, This is blender forum, we want to obviously render in Blender, not some external tool. If I point out that hacky exporters make workflow efficiency worse, how is exporting the whole creation to another DCC and setting rendering up in another DCC easier? I mean that is even way worse workflow than limited exporter directly into a renderer.
2, Houdini is a good tool for advanced effects, but it’s UI/UX nightmare for simple every day tasks like modeling and scene assembly, it’s not a Blender replacement, and it’s not a very good choice for assembling and rendering scenes. I mean, take a look at how most people use Houdini. They actually take sims and assets created in it and usually assemble scenes and render them outside - for good reasons.
3, Houdini Indie is more than affordable. Once you cross the 100k income limit (before the tax actually), then Houdini becomes the most expensive DCC software on the market. I am not complaining about its price, because it has a power to back it up, I am just pointing out that Houdini is not as cheap for everyone.
4, Let’s say someone is just a Blender user. You suggest him to buy whole another DCC, then learn it enough to get as proficient with it as Blender (Usually a task for at least 3 months, and one year on average), then buy a renderer licence for it, not Blender, then suffer a lengthy workflow of destructively exporting your scenes into it and render them there, while giving up great scene management tools like render layers and upcoming collections, then whenever a change comes, go back to Blender, do the changes there, destructively export it again, and usually manually re-apply all the changes to newly imported assets. You really think that is an appropriate solution to a problem like this?
I mean I myself do use Blender only for modeling, and render in Max or Unreal engine, but I would never be silly enough to suggest it as a feasible replacement of a renderer that’s properly integrated in Blender.