The wp_options table holds a lot of information, whether you deem it important or not really depends on what plugins and information you have set up on your website and how important your website is to you.
For example as you’ve noticed it can hold the information for your active plugins, if you activate an important plugin and then rollback to a database from a week prior, you’ll not have that plugin active and that could cause issues – think security plugins, or user enhancement plugins, they’re important to you and your users. Even with 500 rows displayed per page in PHPMyAdmin I have 7 pages of data in wp_options I’d say for myself that it’s all important for my website – it’s security settings for the most part.
The table also holds some crutial information like your site url, home url etc. If you don’t have these set up in your wp-config.php file then removing them may cause you some issues too. Also if you’ve changed the admin email through wp_options and rollback to an older database copy without this change well, it’s not the end of the world you can edit it again but if you have plugins that utilise it then they may play up too. It’s just unnecessary hassle I think to have to re-edit these things, not a disaster though.
It’s better to always back up your database just prior to making changes, that way you can always rollback to a version that’s same day to your editing.