There's still benefits today to using actual modems instead of glorified sound cards or literal sound cards. I have a pactor modem for ham radio use, and it can do several modes other than pactor, like rtty. Compared to using something like fldigi, if I can hear the other side and they can hear me, the data will 100% go through correctly on the physical pactor modem. There's weird jank even when using the basic RF mail software, which can control a variety of modems, or just use your sound card, too. Every session is longer when using software based modems, for example.

I'm aware that the pactor modem itself is probably a software defined device like an FPGA, but it is much better than the software on the PC - and I can use it with an anemic laptop from 2007 with no issues at all, since it just sends text back and forth over a serial port - via USB.