My friend had the exact same stubborn phase, refusing to take darks for over a year. He kept getting these weird gradients in his Orion shots that no amount of flats would fix. Finally, someone told him to look at a single raw sub stretched really hard, and there was this perfect little pattern of hot pixels from a warm sensor. He caved and took a set of dark frames, stacked them in, and it was like someone wiped a dirty window clean. He sent me a before-and-after and it was honestly shocking. Never argued about the extra time again after that.