SSO is important because it's the best mechanism to show that employee lifecycle events are being appropriately mapped into access controls.
You only activate the SSO account when the employee onboards. You deactivate the account when the employee off-boards. You can suspend the account if the employee is on an extended leave-of-absence.
You can do this in one place, as single source of truth, rather than having to demonstrate that all the different identity systems in which Bob is represented have deactivated him when you have to let Bob go.
Ideally this happens automatically due to an integration between your HR system and your identity platform.
The alternative is that you have some kind of runbook that tells you exactly who to speak to about removing accounts from what systems (etc) which rapidly becomes unmanageable as scope of applications and number of employees increases.
Even for small firms, you can run into problems when the person you need to let go is the person that knows how to run the process.