Question - Router Ports

While being familiar with how to configure a network, I'm not exactly an expert, and so I had a thought cross my mind while scrolling through r/homelab and it was such:

How many router ports (Ethernet or otherwise) is the minimum, and what is the benefit to having a router with more than the minimum?

I ask this because, to my knowledge, you should really have as few things connected to the router as possible, and instead route all cables to a switch connected to the router. This would mean your router would need only n+1 ports, with n being equal to the number of switches you want to connect to it. Even then, you could designate a single port on a switch to chaining the next switch, which would leave the router at needing just 2 ports.

This then opens up the question of whether there is a net benefit from connecting a switch directly to the router (aside from the few nanoseconds of travel time). Anyway, I tried looking up the answer on Google, but got a bunch of garbage posts about how to connect a switch to a router, and I didn't know how to phrase this question differently to get the appropriate search results.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you can answer my question.