A lot of “hardware raid” is just a separate controller doing software raid. I thought I lost access to a bunch of data when my raid controller died, before I realized that I could just plug the disks directly into the computer and mount them with mdadm. But yes, hardware raid seems a bit pointless nowadays.
Yeah that’s my experience so far. The only thing Microsoft has managed to ruin so far when it comes to Java edition is the launcher. Luckily there are many great FOSS launchers out there (Prism is my favorite). Everything else is working just fine, and the gameplay updates from the last couple of years have been good.