Back in the day - rooting Android phones and installing custom ROMs were such a big part of Android. I remember so well using titanium backup and Greenify and Cyanogenmod and the list goes on.
Is it still necessary to root in 2023 though?
I have been on vanilla Android without root access for the past couple of years and at this point most root features have made it into the vanilla Android OS. What are your thoughts?
I like vanilla Android, but many phone companies has their own version of it with meaningless pre-installed apps. I typically root and install vanilla OS and thats it.
A custom rom isn't the same as rooting though. I've used custom roms without rooting them quite a bit, so my answer to op's question is that no it really isn't that essential, unless you need some very specific magisk module or something.
Ah apologies, I have equate rooting same as flashing custom roms, custom roms only requires unlocking the bootloader.
Yes, I also noticed that recently I have little need to root to tweak around the system. But I do use some apps that requires root, and that is the only reason of my continuing doing so.