I'm not sure that you understand hardware wallets sir. There are legitimate reasons to not like or distrust them (trust in manufacturer, device is a tell for crypto ownership) but the above is not that.
Hardware wallet redundancy is achieved through seedphrase and additionally a potential passphrase. These are used to generate your private key. You can lose/steal/destroy the wallet and still retrieve the funds via this backup. Wallet acts as the private key (signing device) for any transactions for your addresses. This device must be accessed and provide confirmation for transactions to take place. As such the device itself is just an interface between the physical world and the blockchain and it stores the keys OFFLINE.
Software wallets can be similarly secure if properly gapped (not on an internet connected device, thus acting as a HW wallet in practice) but in most cases they are internet connected and they have all the security vulnerabilities that go with that.
Both options are really just storing a unique hash that is used with a RNG to create addresses for UTXOs and sign transactions for those UTXOs. If you're concerned about HW wallet reliability consider a mutli-sig configuration and spread the risk across multiple devices.
Simplified explanation on the differences:
A detailed guide on Hardware Wallets and how to keep your crypto safe.
www.bitamp.com
EDIT: More detail on how to recover from seedphrase. Secured properly you don't even need the same device (depending on HW wallet)
Information about wallet defaults for external recovery
walletsrecovery.org