It's all been slowly cooking for a decade, yet people will still claim "but you can still do it with root, so it's as free as before!" (or some other ridiculously complicated workaround with lots of nasty side-effects)
These are tempting choices, but they go a lot further than, for example, requiring only modern TLS ciphersuites to be used to communicate with my servers. They dictate the state of your entire device, and no one app or company should have that power, unless you work for the company and they issue you the device -- but even then, modern MDM/MAM can and should sandbox company apps from the rest of the device.
Google has little choice but to provide them with the tools to detect root access.
Some of the entities that want it do have pull.
And while for years the alternatives have been almost nonexistent, we do have at least two now : PinePhone and Librem 5.
You have to use pretty shaky workarounds to trick them, and there is a known way to make those workarounds impossible.
Features though? Maybe I don't realize all the great things I'm missing out on since I've only ever used rooted phones since I got my first Android device many years ago.
As for apps, I've only heard of certain games (I don't play games on my phone) and banking apps (thankfully mine doesn't care, though I'd rather use a desktop web interface for financial stuff).