Not always (raise your hand if you've had an unbootable system due to a broken or insufficient initrd).
In retrospect, the whole concept of the initrd seems like an enormous kludge that was thrown together temporarily and became the permanent solution.
What seems bad about it to you? Initrd means you only need /boot (or equivalent) to be working at boot time, which seems nice to me. And looking at mine, the image is smaller than the kernel, so it's not wasting a ton of space.
Sure it could be blamed on shitty distro maintenance and development but a better architecture would be putting essential things like filesystem drivers in /boot without this extra kludge of rebuilding an initrd (that you hopefully didn't forget to do before typing reboot) which depends on a pile of config files set just right (and oh by the way different in literally every distro).
Rebuilding an image isn't a big factor there, it's a tradeoff between making setup a bit more annoying versus making it a bit easier to manage your boot files.
Eh, kinda. That's where "essential" .ko modules are packed into - those that system would fail to boot without.
Alternative is to compile them into kernel as built-ins, but from distro maintainers' perspective, that means including way too many modules, most of which will remain unused.
If you're compiling your own kernel, that's a different story, often you can do without initrd just fine.