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It's not completely redundant. You can't make a naked CNAME record (technically you can, but things will break in mysterious ways), and there's no standardised means of dynamically updating an A/AAAA record e.g. to match a virtualised load balancer (e.g. AWS ELB). Vendors have non-standard extensions to work around this, e.g. Route53 has the ALIAS virtual type (which presents itself as an A/AAAA to the clients); I wrote some cron+dig hacks in the past when that wasn't available (e.g. with ChinaCache).

I prefer no-www for aesthetic reasons, but there do seem to be some good reasons for some sites to use www: https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/

At the time it probably was more neccesary. Http wasn't the only game in town.

But don't underestimate the value of branding either.

also reminds me of folks who went with web.* instead of www.* a while back when we thought thats how things would go. still cant remember the full reason behind it.