Are bonds/fixed income really required for someone approaching retirement?

Trying to help a relative with some retirement planning. The traditional advice you see everywhere is to allocate more and more of your portfolio towards bonds/fixed income as you approach retirement. Often the end goal is something around 40-60% being bonds and the remainder being equities. The thought is that if there is a crash, the bonds will cushion your portfolio's downfall and preserve cash you may need for living expenses. I'm questioning if this is worth it. Looking at the 2008 crash and comparing VTI and BND (yes I know BND is a bond fund not bonds, but for this discussion I believe they are close enough), it looks like VTI dropped 30% while BND dropped 7%. So yes, this afforded a 23% downside protection. However VTI recovered in three years and over the long term obviously vastly outperforms BND. So my question is, if you are able to survive a few years without depleting your retirement savings, isn't it better to stay with a majority equities? And when I think about it, even if there is a crash in three years and BND ends up saving you another 23%, the three years from now until then could very well see more than 23% upside if you held VTI. So even if VTI crashes at some point in the next few years, every year you hold it you are gaining more of a "lead" on BND and thus making the end result better in your favor. For reference the relative's holdings are ~$2M and they will have around ~$40k/yr real estate income as well. If they were super tight on budget I might be more wary but since they are in pretty good shape I think having bonds be 60% of their portfolio would be too limiting for upside. I was thinking something closer to 20-30%. Am I crazy? Also slightly related, is something like SGOV worth considering to be part of the bonds/fixed income portfolio? Looking at BND it has averaged only 1.3% annual return in the past 10 years (3% since 2007) and I feel like, at least while rates are decently high, SGOV's consistent 3.5% will be better? And then don't have to worry about bond prices going up or down.