For me version control isn't even really about having backups (though that is a nice side effect). Version control is about documenting and annotating the process of creation, and it is uniquely necessary in programming because of how eternally iterative programming is. Code that is not annotated with its history and its motivations suffers to an extreme degree from entropy, becoming more and more difficult to understand.
VC is part of code. Not using it is, to me, like refusing to use verbs.
It's also a useful way of managing different experiments, and discarding the ones that didn't work and reverting to last known good, or integrating the ones that do work. That gets increasingly messier as your codebase grows.
I agree that version control is a fundamental part of software and if you ever have to read code I hope you have access to the versioning and issue discussions. Some people are ok without it for personal projects, but one day someone is going to read your code. Please be nice to them and give them the history behind your decisions.
Version Control is not really a part of the code, but it's a part of the whole project if you will. There's code, version control, build system, issue tracker.
In some cases these can be very simple, and the simplest cases I can think of are: version control - backups, build system - batch/script file, issue tracker - text file.
Although once you know one of the more complex versions of each system then it's easier to just use that. (Git/SVN/CVS, make/CMake/Premake, etc)
well vc to me is about merging and managing integration in a sane way, the ability to rollback on snafu is surely welcome, but for my side projects I just use some cloud sync service
Then you lack the history of your code, storing only the latest version. Though for personal projects, this might not matter, it's all a part of discipline in my eyes.
If you see SCM as too time consuming, then I think you need more practise, and as such, should be using as much as you can.
VC is part of code. Not using it is, to me, like refusing to use verbs.