Essential? no.

Worth it? maybe.

Nice to have control of your own device? absolutely.

I have two devices, primary with root (through Magisk as KernelSU still has some issues for me) and secondary without root. Anytime I have to do something more demanding on the unrooted device I really wish I had root. Local terminal access, ability to disable some annoying “features” (verified app links) and multiple other things I use daily make it worth it for me.

EDIT: I saw mentions of custom roms in other comments. I have a custom rom installed (AOSP based). If I was on a stock rom (or god forbid something like MIUI) root would be a must for me.

Syncthing plays nicely with obsidian if you ever have to synchronise the vault between multiple devices.

Not so much about testing, but one time I really needed to get to my backups I lost password to the repository (I’m using restic). Luckily a copy of it was stored in bitwarden, but until I remembered it, were perhaps one of the worst moments.

Needless to say, please test backups and store secrets in more then one place.

It’s the first time I hear about resticprofile and it looks nice. So far I’ve been using crestic for configuration files. Do you know how they compare?

One more reason to use a custom ROM. Death to the bloat!