But is hibernate relevant? I've found suspend to be much more reliable, and good enough in terms of energy consumption (thanks to modern low-power states in CPUs).

I find it relevant. I use it to store the state my work laptop is in at the end of the day, and then restore that state when I get back to work the next work day. That way I don't need to keep it switched on when I'm not using it/transporting it.

Is there a better solution to this other than hibernating?

Duh, yes, that is needed. I don't have hibernate enabled on my laptop though, nor more importantly, my server.