Not true at all, if you save the 24 seed words, your hardware wallet is not needed. You can use another hardware wallet or even a software wallet to recover.

A software wallet can be compromised in memory and hacked with malware where as a hardware wallet cannot be. There are some vulnerabilities though, like changing wallet addresses from the clipboard but this can be mitigated by checking the hardware wallet screen.

There are many reasons why a hardware wallet is safer than a software wallet, but if nothing happens then a software wallet is fine.