Back in'th day when men were men and whippets were frightened and kept their tails tucked between their legs for safety I used to find that front tyre balancing was fairly critical on my old rwd cars like Marinas and Mk1/2 Escorts. Front wheel bearings tended to be "nip up hand tight and then back off a tad for clearance" type things and any play in them got rapidly exacerbated by out of balance tyres leading to the steering wheel shakes at about 60 mph usually depending on resonant frequencies.
My mate has just stuck some good s/h tyres on the front rims of my Focus and also on a Mondeo I'm selling to someone else with his tyre changer and as his balancer is kaputt we didn't bother. We just left the existing weights on the rims. In fact he's been running unbalanced tyres for years on his own modern vehicles and said it didn't seem to make any odds. Well to my surprise I don't notice any issue on either of the above cars after testing them at various steady speeds.
In fact one of the tyres we took off the front of my Focus had a bulge in the tread which was causing the steering wheel to oscillate by an inch at the rim if you took your hands off it at 20 mph as the tyre rotated over the high spot. This must also have been causing quite an imbalance at higher speeds but it never manifested as shake or vibration.
So either modern fwd cars have front wheel bearings and suspensions that are not that critical to wheel balance or modern tyres are better balanced as made than older ones or there's summat else I'm missing. Not having to bother paying for this to be done is a good saving if you don't have your own tyre balancer.
A mate who works at the local council tells me that they also don't bother having tyres balanced anymore on council vehicles after looking into the cost / benefits.
What are the thoughts of the collective?