For me personally, I rely on the extra protection of netherite and the fact it does not burn in lava has saved many hours of re-grinding gear.
I play on a survival server which can be pretty hostile for me since I'm based in a 4th world country and the lag often kills me before any picture updates on my screen.
It'll happen the most with flowing lava when I'm mining (which I do a lot of on my phone), by the time my screen shows me that I've mined into a lava source, it has already flowed on the server and burned me...
I'll step back pretty quickly once it appears on my screen fast enough for my device to not register the burning, but a second later I get the death message screen.
Without netherite, the game isn't necessarily unplayable, but it makes it an arduous task to dig anywhere that lava could possibly be...
Summary:
For me, yes, netherite is a required thing to be in the game otherwise due to my 200ms+ ping, I would not play it.
