You can easily play through the game without looting anything but chests and you won’t miss anything you don’t need.
The bookshelves are quite a chore. So many same books and parchmetns, all worth 14 gp. But you can't skip these if you want to know how the absolute was formed and how they became what they are at the time of the game. So yes, purely from a material inventory you can skip them, but will lose a lot of understanding of what is going on and how we got here.
