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.
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.
This is very true and as matter in fact, the creators of Lemmy are communists.