That meant that if you wanted to travel you had to have the printed key with you, or at such reboots at least phone somebody to who you have given that key. Which isn't a problem in an organization, were that somebody are the admins, who were those who made the keys before they gave you the notebook.
I don't know how it works currently, if MS invented something more convenient recently.
But you still have to type it in.
I do this regularly as a recent W10 upgrade broke the SoftTPM in my Ryzen CPU (no longer recognised at boot), so I type it in everytime I boot windows (so once or three times a month).
It's very resilient since it has a built-in Error Detection Code for each 6 digit pair entered, if you make a typo, it likely will immediately complain and prevents entering any more of the code.
For the few times in the month where I need Windows, it's not worth the effort.
From my previous experience, Windows will happily insert the decryption key into the TPM once you enter the recovery code.
Things are different in the case of something like a phone. In that case you are pretty much forced to use some low entropy key that could otherwise be brute forced. Then a secure hardware device makes sense, particularly if the phone does not use the device for everything but the kitchen sink as in this case.
A nice improvement would be to use a PIN entered at boot for purposes of drive decryption and then automatically pass it through to the OS-level login.
Well, to whom do I tell my long passphrase? Right: my computer. Every morning. Is it running the same software as last night, no keyloggers, etc?
That’s what the TPM is for.
I used to work on BitLocker so I'm biased, but it's not pointless at all. If the hardware configuration, firmware, bootloader, boot settings, etc. are unchanged, as measured by Secure Boot and then each subsequent boot component, the TPM releases the key and automatically unlocks the drive. From that point forward, security depends on OS-level authentication and authorization. Even assuming poor hardware-level security, this will still protect against the only reasonable threat faced by most people: access to private data by device thieves or physical intruders.
If you are in the tiny minority that actually wants to protect yourself against sophisticated actors who have exploits for the OS-level security, or the ability to extract keys from a running system or with a cold boot attack, you will want to be selective about your hardware and you might want to additionally rely on a PIN, password, or dongle in conjunction with the TPM/SecureBoot protection.