If you have a single host, and a single printer, or your printer itself is both network-enabled and can manage its own print spool, direct TCP/IP printing may indeed work for you.
The value of CUPS is that it enables the CUPS-serving computer to run as a print server. This means not only print drivers (document format support --- typically plain text, Postscript, and one or more PDL (printer definition languages) & PCL (Printer Control Language), but status on the printer, queue management, job control, and access control. Note that if your printer is generally available on your local WiFi network, you might want to give more thought to that last element.
If those are overkill for you and your printer Just Works with generated output, then yes, you can get by without the complexity.
Note that you can also often telnet directly to the printer port.
Be aware of what you're trading off, though, and whether or not you actually need what CUPS, or direct network access, offers.
The CUPS web front-end also has rough edges; Apple maintains CUPS these days and OS X now ships with the web interface on :631 disabled.
If you still need a print server, it can be well worth the extra $100 or so to buy a business-class printer with an IPP server in it, so that CUPS runs on a chip inside the printer instead of on a separate computer. (Generally anything that supports "Airprint" will do this, and also at the mid range you avoid the "printers whose ink cartridges are more expensive than the printer" zone.)
Apple never really maintained CUPS. They hired the author, Michael Sweet, and he pretty much served as the printing team. He left Apple a couple years ago, and basically stalled their printing department.
He’s recently become head of the Printer Working Group, and they’re all pushing IPP Everywhere towards greater adoption. It’s a laudable effort.
After he left, all his cups commits to Apple's public CUPS repo stopped[1] and his work continued in the OpenPrinting fork of CUPS[2]. Interestingly though, it seems he resumed committing to the Apple repo in March. I'm glad CUPS on macOS isn't going to be left behind, but I'm curious what happened there.
The value of CUPS is that it enables the CUPS-serving computer to run as a print server. This means not only print drivers (document format support --- typically plain text, Postscript, and one or more PDL (printer definition languages) & PCL (Printer Control Language), but status on the printer, queue management, job control, and access control. Note that if your printer is generally available on your local WiFi network, you might want to give more thought to that last element.
If those are overkill for you and your printer Just Works with generated output, then yes, you can get by without the complexity.
Note that you can also often telnet directly to the printer port.
Be aware of what you're trading off, though, and whether or not you actually need what CUPS, or direct network access, offers.