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They aren't cops, any more than the guy at the front gate into your neighborhood is a cop. They aren't trained, sworn law enforcement officers, they don't carry weapons, and they don't have arrest authority. I don't have a problem with those folks, until they start acting like they have cop authority, but that's pretty rare. Most of them just want a job where they just stand there.

The inspection system isn't perfect - NOTHING IS, and criticizing any massive system for not being perfect is disingenuous. Perhaps their presence is mostly theater, but it's useful theater. A major point of the system isn't just to catch threats from coming onto the plane, but discourage people from using the airports or airplanes for whatever nonsense they're planning. In fact, that may be the bigger point. In this era of mass shootings, we can attribute the fact that we haven't had a maniac shoot up a plane to the presence of TSA, and the entire inspection system, and thank them. Who knows how many incidents they discourage every day?

Finally, YOU said:

Terrorist attacks on planes are incredibly rare,

And why is that?

This reminds me of Trump whining that we had to abolish the Clean Air & Water Act, because our air and water is perfectly clean, this is just useless regulation. What it doesn't take into account was that when it started, our air and water quality was terrible due to decades of industrial pollution, leaded gas, and environmental neglect and abuse. That Act cleaned it all up, and had kept it clean. He just sees the successful result, and declares the law that accomplished it to be useless. You're doing the same thing with TSA.

Look at the number of hijackings before 9/11, compared to the number of hijackings since 9/11:

Airline hijackings dropped drastically after 9/11 due to enhanced security, moving from a relatively common occurrence to a rare event. While hundreds occurred globally between 1968 and 1972, and over 130 happened in the U.S. in one four-year period, there have been no successful hijackings in the U.S. since 9/11.

Airline hijackings, once relatively common, are rare today

Before TSA, hijackings and airport attacks were common, all over the world, finally culminating in 9/11. Since establishing the modern inspection system, we have not had a major incident like that since then. A couple of dipshits tried to light their shoes and underwear on fire, but both passengers and flight crews have adopted a different attitude, and beat the crap out of those guys, and TSA adjusted. Now we take our shoes off, and we get our naughty bits x-rayed. Some guy tried to sneak in water bottles with explosives, so now we can't have water bottles.

As for tiny shampoos, that has nothing to do with terrorism, just weight. You're going off for a long weekend, you don't need a giant bottle of every hair product you own. I don't want my plane going down because everyone had to bring a full 36 oz bottle of their backup hair conditioner, causing the front to fall off.

The system was planned and implemented, and has evolved to address emerging threats, and the result has been far fewer incidents both in-flight and in the airports, and that is a direct result of TSA and the program that they operate. There is the occasional publicized unpleasant incident, but they are an infinitesimal percentage of the enormous number of people that access air travel on a daily basis.

I don't worry about flying at all these days, but if TSA were to leave, I don't think I would fly anymore. I don't mind driving, I kind of like it, singing along loudly to my favorite music, and looking for little local BBQ joints along the way.

And nothing normalizes law enforcement overreach more than red light and speeding cameras.