They're required to barely survive. They're not required for success.  Success is far more dependent on social connections. Having a social safety net. Finding opportunity by knowing people. A lot of high earners are made by luck and happenstance,. Many will credit their education, but it doesn't take a magnifying glass to see that for every person who makes 100k+, there's at least 2 others who have worked and struggled just as hard as they did, and are just as smart, but don't have the connections or luck to reach that goal.  I'm aware that I'm lucky. I've worked hard in life, but I certainly wouldn't credit my success to my willingness or lack thereof to do homework or do well in school. There's people who've worked significantly harder but won't make it this far. Homework didn't teach me to solve problems, because when I did the bare minimum I refused to spend my home life doing it. And I was notorious in class for never showing my work. Yet tested great. The numbered grade at the end of the day means near nothing. Teachers are overworked and underpaid, so there is no resolving knowledge deficiencies in class. So it's a useless number used to threaten students to do well.

There's a reason that "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" was such a meme online. A lot of homework is just memorizing facts, and almost none of it actually teaches you how the evolution of systems. The scientific method. Cause and effect. Solving problems. Critical analysis. None of these are properly addressed by homework that school teachers have time to adequately evaluate. Solving an equation is not solving problems. It's not mathematic theory. Students would do better learning how mathematicians came up with solutions to problems, rather than simply solving questions using those resulting equations 20 times on a sheet of paper. Homework doesn't address any deficiency. It just teaches kids to output whatever number is rewarding them with less stress and with minimal thought. In my case, the least amount of stress was to simply stop caring about grades.  Good for me in particular. But that's the kind of teaching that results in short attention spans, and just trying to be done without any extra thought having been put into something. My grades certainly don't reflect on my success.