Is there a way to 'stop' the light from the hdri?

[oak marlin]

the object should be blocking the light reflection on the 'ground'

for area light it works as I would expect

But even in this example the light, reflection from the sky is still seen in the 'ground'

its just a little harder to see

[mild knot]

What kind of reflections are you using
HDRP has great many options

[oak marlin]

but even if i turn off screen space reflections nothing changes, i am not sure where the settings are for that

[mild knot]

For sky to be occluded in that position you do need SSR, either in ray marching or ray tracing mode

I'd try ray marching just to see if it handles it better than ray tracing for whatever reason

[oak marlin]

But I had it enabled in those images

[mild knot]

Which one you had enabled?

[oak marlin]

SSR

[mild knot]

Yes, like I said I would try ray matching instead of ray tracing to see the difference

The reflection of the area light looks ray traced, so the sky should be, but the need is to investigate why

To see if the sky is occluded in ray marched reflection could be one way to get clues

[oak marlin]

wow, the Mixed setting fixed it

ray marching alone didnt fix it

Thanks!

Not sure if this is intended or not

I thouth that ray tracing alone is always better than mixed or marching

[mild knot]

Not always
Both ray tracing and ray marching have their own disadvantages, mixed is meant so they can fill in for each other where one would fail

But it doesn't explain why ray tracing would fail there