Even if you're not worried about Russian bombers, we are still part of NORAD, and they still need to be intercepted. A shooting war with Russia and the USA, while not being very likely, could still happen, even in a very limited engagement/event, and if so, you can be certain that Russia would be sending bombers through Canadian airspace, which means they'll be gunning for our C3 in order to degrade the Americans/NORADs effectiveness. As Jutes said, you can't rely on drones to do this, as they aren't there yet (friend of mine, Carl Norman, works for DARPA on this very thing, air to air capable drones - right now they can be used against a certain threat, ie in a shooting war, but they can't intercept unknowns and make decisions in a non-shooting war environment, they don't have reliable AI for this yet, and it's decades away still). There needs to be a "man in the loop" still in terms of decision making in the cockpit. Just how it is right now.
Regarding the F22 - it isn't just thrust to weight and thrust vectoring that gives it an incredible capability in close (video below). Yes, the USAF focuses on using C3/Awacs/data link/situational awareness modes in fighters/etc to maintain a picture of the battle space, the enemy isn't going to sit by and just let this happen without contesting it, which means piles of enemy ECM and other methods to degrade the USAF/NATOs ability to maintain this accurate picture of what's happening. This, and a thousand other things, can happen and make fighters, even the low observable F22/F35 with their incredible sensors and data management systems sucking in information, be degraded in this area, which can result in BVR not being so easy to accomplish, and ACM fights can be the result, ie merging with enemy fighters/strikers. The F22 is well equipped for this, and the F35 is no slouch either. Again, watch this video below, one of the best I've seen on the F22 capabilities in this regard, starts getting into F22 stuff at the 15 minute mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evhrk5tY-Yo