At least have a dedicated /home partition. This way if you want to upgrade the OS, change distribution, heck even migrate to a totally different OS your actual data is safe. Also if you need to do a backup, “just” backup /home which is probably going to be significantly faster and convenient than the entire OS. It also avoid using e.g dd and get a rather opaque file.

TL;DR: yes /home keeps your data safe

some partitions are useful. Keeping /var and /tmp separate can stop DoS attacks by now allowing logs to fill the entire drive /home means you can wipe the / partition and keep user data.