It’s true what you say, the golden days of rooting are over. I rooted my phone just so I could set a battery charge limit, but a recent update for the ROM I’m using (/e/ os) added that feature natively lol. Pretty much the only thing you can do nowadays with root is install tweaks that hide the fact that you have root from other apps lol.
A lot of “hardware raid” is just a separate controller doing software raid. I thought I lost access to a bunch of data when my raid controller died, before I realized that I could just plug the disks directly into the computer and mount them with mdadm. But yes, hardware raid seems a bit pointless nowadays.