alt Hacker NewsSoftware rendering was useful for me for a long time but as a long-time gamer (from the original DOOM to Cyberpunk 2077 and beyond) I can firmly say that real-time raytraced games at 4K/60FPS with dynamic lighting, reflections, massive geometry detail, etc, all greatly enhance the experience. That said, the old DOOM aesthetic pre-Voodoo was definitely nice. The voodoo smoothing had a nice cheap feel to it, too.
The difference in performance is just so big, unless you're targeting something without a GPU, there is no world in which you would want to leave it unutilized IMO, even if you're just rendering an UI. I can do things on my slow phone in WebGL that would stutter on my desktop if I drew the pixels with the CPU.