Of course it's not necessary. I'm a way-beyond-senior dev who laughed at LLMs up until a few months ago when trusted friends, whose competence is not in question, told me they got good usage out of them.

I decided to challenge my convictions and sat down and took the time to learn how to use LLM assistants (I tried everyting from full vibe coding to manual gatekeeping of suggestions).

Now I use them for my own personal projects, and I'm much more productive (for various reasons - but one is that the initial friction of oh yet another thing I have to learn just to do X is much lower. I have no boss telling me what to do, and I select my projects myself. If they didn't bring any benefits I wouldn't use them.