However, there are some places where pure rope+knots are used in climbing.
I find climbing very interesting because it crosses a red-line that usually is never crossed in structural engineering — using devices to "suspend overhead loads". Put another way, it one of the few places that rope is made part of a life-critical system. (For climbing, the situation is reversed: rather than the load being suspended over a human's head, the load that's being suspended IS the human. Either way, if the rope breaks, the human is injured.)