But I don’t like to lose any data at all if avoidable, no matter how unimportant that data is. I still keep VHD disk images from these 3 old laptops, thanks to nearly exponential decline of disk costs per TB.
Definitely not true. For most college students, a laptop is their only computer.
Sometimes laptops are stolen or destroyed completely like dropped into the sea, for that they need to backup data.
But I think these cases are rare. Displays, hinges, and motherboards fail way more often, IMO. It’s nice to be able to recover data by moving SSD from the broken laptop into a USB3 enclosure, these enclosures are sold for $20-40. Another good option is getting another laptop based on the same chipset, and simply replacing the disk. None of these options are available for laptops with soldered SSDs.