I don’t see it as a status symbol, although I’m certain that is a huge part of it for a lot of people, but fashion part is right. Cars have design styles, motifs, and trends. I don’t know the names for most of them, but I can normally place a car in a 3 year range on sight. Make and model are also often very obvious through those same features, even across a larger number of years, slowly transitioning from one "age’ of car design to another. I’m not a car person, but I am, in weird ways, a design nerd.
I’ve been using and reasonably satisfied with A.R.M. https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-ripping-machine
It uses MakeMKV and Handbrake, but streamlines the whole process.