With Compose, do we really need an activity to be destroyed and recreated? As per docs:

The restart behavior is designed to help your application adapt to new configurations by automatically reloading your application with alternative resources that match the new device configuration.

But compose screen can easily recompose with new configuration without having to restart an activity. Or if resources are read inside composable function via

dimensionResource()

etc, we still need to recreate activity?

For Compose-only apps, no, you can configure the activity to handle its own config changes instead of recreating. Restoring from saved instance state after app process restart is still relevant though, as are cases of using compose within parts of an existing app where the activity recreation still happens.

filed as https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/167352819