Agreed. You’re at the mercy of your USB controllers as well as southbridge in that case.

You’re adding more things that can go wrong.

Generally HBA/RAID cards are usually built for enterprise rather than consumer so they’re usually more reliable as well.

Today’s CPUs usually expose some USB connections directly. Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs expose 4 USB 3.2 Gen 2 directly on their on-package I/O die for example. So if you connect your USB drives directly to the ports your mainboard connects directly to the CPU, the chipset (“southbridge”) and any third-party USB controllers are out of the equation.

This is just information, I’m not advising to use USB for fixed storage.