It's all about reducing the trusted computing base, both in terms of lines of code and of organizations supplying said code.

Most people's computes run a lot of software, including a general-purpose OS with a huge attack surface and third-party applications, often with broad or even unconstrained access to all their files.

General purpose computers often also don't have tamper-proof secure storage; hardware wallets generally do.

Strictly speaking, a hardware wallet doesn't hold your "money". Your assets live on the blockchain, and your seed phrase generates the private keys that control them.

The hardware wallet is just a sandboxed interface between you, your seed, and the blockchain. It requires a computer to connect to you and the internet.

In other words: as long as you have your seed phrase (and your passphrase, if you set one) on a piece of paper, you can smash your hardware wallet to bits and be fine.

(This assumes a standard single-signature wallet using the BIP-39 standard)

If there was ever any appeal to me, it’s that vague notion that machines get wiped, rebuilt, compromised, travel, get stolen, etc. A dedicated device could kinda avoid some of that if it mostly sits in a safe or something.

I never did get one, though.

Your general purpose computer is connected to the internet 24/7. It runs a complex operating system which constantly gets updated and patched. It visits dodgy websites, downloads npm packages, backs up files to the cloud, etc.

Thus the attack surface is far greater.

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