It may not help you now, but it will when you need a new TV. As you have found out no electronic devices have eternal life.
ARC is the audio return channel that sends audio from a TV back to the receiver from a TV that supports it. It uses the same cable as the one that sends the picture to the TV from your receiver. ARC is the first effort, and the audio sent back is lossy and has digital compression.
eARC is much better, reliable and supports full bandwidth audio including lossless audio and Dolby Atmos. Again both receiver and TV must have eARC HDMI sockets.
eARC is very useful as it allows you to stream the audio back from apps your TV supports.
So depending on what TV you have now this may not be a big deal at the moment, but I can absolutely tell you, that you will need it.
If your TV is very old, you should consider upgrading that also. This whole arena has undergone massive transformation in recent years.