There's a lot of hidden value in physical contact. I don't think it should be disregarded so easily considering society as a whole became much more distant in recent years.
In one of the older versions of google maps having location turned off meant that the app wouldn't accept any input since a notification 'Turn on your location' kept repeatedly coming up somehow blocking everything. Effectively rendered the app unusable.
At least one use case is typing something in one workspace while looking at another. Incredibly useful when you need to edit config files or edit specific portions of text. Since you only need the parts of where you're "copying" from typing it out is usually much faster.
By and large this seems absolutely useless to me. Sure it looks nice and more "polished" but it doesn't serve any purpose. There plenty of better ways to signal transitions and clicks rather than flaky button animations.
It seems to me like there's two different things being discussed in this thread. The first one being passion about being better than everyone else as you mentioned and the second one is a desire to work on yourself on different aspects of life, a.k.a. try to be as well-rounded person as possible. When put in action these things are deceptively similar yet the underlying reasons for doing them are very different.