Staging sells the room. This sells the decision.
The expensive part of staging is not the furniture, it is the round trip: a walkthrough, a proposal, a conversation about whether the client wants warm or spare, and only then a van. Most of that is a disagreement about taste that is faster to settle by looking at the room than by describing it.
Render the same room in two directions and let them point. That conversation takes a minute instead of a week, and the job you win is the one they already agreed to.
Where the line is
Adding furniture and decor to a room is staging. Changing the room is not. Duskly will insert a sofa and will not repaint the wall behind it, because paint, flooring and permanent fixtures are condition, and altering condition is prohibited in several markets even when it is disclosed.
That boundary is also the useful one commercially. A staged photo that implies a renovation the buyer will not find is the kind of complaint that reaches a broker.
On the listing rather than in the proposal
A proposal image and a published listing image are different objects. The first is a conversation aid. The second is an altered listing photo carrying a disclosure obligation for whoever publishes it, and in several markets an obligation to publish the unaltered original beside it.
If the render ends up in the MLS, buy the listing so the original, the wording and the audit record travel with the image rather than being reconstructed from memory later.