If you wan my personal opinion I think HR exists solely to come up with reasons for HR to exist. Well minus the administrative part of handling employees payments (including stuff like maternity/sick leave) and the lawyers. But both of those functions could be branched into economy and general legal.

The entire branch of team-building/personality matching/management consulting/management training/management network facilitating is a fat unnecessary cow that enterprise organisations will never get rid of because they are very good at being “people skills” and positioning themselves with top management.

After a year of lockdowns, where they’ve been completely unable to execute their regular function, their absence have left no mark on our organisation though.