Hardware wallets are a must have, especially if you have a lot of money in crypto. Think of it this way: Pretty much every single wallet has an app and you can carry it around with you on your phone. If you had a million dollars, would you go about your day with all that money on you? Or would you store it somewhere safe, like in a safe in your home? I think this analogy explains the need to own hardware wallets pretty well.
You should keep your coins secure, hardware wallets are the best for this purpose, if you want to use the coins as well. You should keep the hardware wallet in the safe unless you really want to spend some coins, because to check you balance, there's no need to have the hardware wallet at your fingertips. You can check your balance wiht your address on a blockchain explorer, you only need the hardware wallet if you want to spend or e.g. if you want to sign a message.
The best thing is that when you use a hardware wallet, you don't need to expose your private keys, because the hardware wallets does everything inside, and it only send signed transaction or signed message out, which doesn't cointain private key at all.
The only, the most important thing is the seed (the 24 words, generated at the first start of the hardware wallet), this is the key of the backups, so keep it in a secure place, more secure than the hardware wallet itself. As long as you (and only you) have that seed, you and your coins are safe.
