You do add noise with pump, which works similarly to fan, but instead of air it moves water. And depending on your cooling set up, AIOs can help you to reduce total amount of system fans.
Like both you and I said, it's not the early 2000s anymore. Pump technology has improved a lot too. I can't even hear the pump of my H100i over the whisper quiet hum of my case fans, even if I put my ear against the chassis. Of course, without the USB connected, it's running at its lowest RPM, but like I said, I've experienced minimal differences in cooling efficiency by changing the pump speed, so I'm fine.
It's mostly due to not really needing anything better and if I actually needed something better than I would hate the heat output anyway, so yeah.
Not needing more is cool.
We tend to forget in our deeply technological world that we don't always need the latest and greatest to be happy. I think my PC setup is completely agreeable for what I need it for (1080p gaming at 60 Hz), so I might not be upgrading it for a while. Reviewers tend to bash the raytracing capabilities of non-Ampere cards, but I just finished Cyberpunk 2077 with all settings maxed out, RT pshycho, DLSS quality at 40-50 fps, which I think is brilliant. With this in mind, my next upgrade is probably going to be a cosmetic one, or of a "peace of mind" type.
There's an existential crisis. When computer is pretty much touching my leg all the time and is placed under desk and desk itself traps heat there, extra heat is very undesirable and since my room isn't very big, it's easy to heat it up and that's undesirable. Stock RX 580 is enough to create sauna like conditions even during winter and at summer, it's unbearable. So I had to fix that with vBIOS tweaking. I limited card to 100 watts, but usually it stays at 84-90 watts of power usage with limited clock speed of 1.1GHz. With CPU and card loaded, my computer outputs almost 200 watts of heat and that's just good enough. And there isn't any AC in my room or anywhere else, so I depend on outdoor temperatures a lot. This summer was particularly awful with some days having 36C. It's already hot to begin with and I sweated a lot without doing anything, I tried to put some load on PC and that was pretty brutal. Even on 30C days heat was brutal. But now outdoors temperature is up to 18C, so heat isn't a problem anymore.
I can see your point, though it's worth noting that your PC doesn't produce less heat just because you cool it differently. Watercoolers conduct heat from your CPU/GPU to the edge of the chassis (radiator) more effectively, and the heat output of a radiator is more concentrated than exhausting the already dispersed heat from your chassis, but the heat output of your CPU/GPU is the same, regardless of your cooling method.
Undervolting and/or modifying power targets is a different story. There's a lot to be gained there. My 2070 has a power slider of 71-114%. At 114% it's hotter and louder, but doesn't produce any more FPS. At 71% it's dead silent, and produces around 5-10% less FPS than normal, which is barely noticeable. On the other hand, my 11700 is around 40-45% faster with its power targets disabled, so I'm gonna leave it as it is.