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Typically when I rip a disc, I rip everything and then check each file to determine what I'll be keeping. Since an .mpls is a playlist of .m2ts files, is there any reason why I would ever actually want to rip the .m2ts titles?

Probably not. There are very rare occasions where discs are authored in a funny way where you might want the 'raw' .m2ts files in order to get at some extra that doesn't have its own .mpls. I seem to recall one or two discussions on this board around that topic, but it is very rare.

In the two days since I posted this, I discovered a disc that I had to go back and rip the m2ts files to obtain all of the extras (Godzilla King of the Monsters). I ripped a few other discs without including the .m2ts, but I haven't processed them yet. I'll need to see how those discs check out. I was really hoping that this would save some time, but I think I'll probably continue ripping the entire disc.

When dealing with extras, your minimum title length comes in to play. I set mine to 30 seconds; the default 120 seconds can skip over a lot more extras.

Often, most extras are in a single m2ts file, and play lists separate them out to individual titles. If those individual titles are less than your minimum, you won't even see them to select them.

I'm a little overly cautious. My minimum length is actually set to 1 second. I had a James Bond disc years ago that had a poster gallery that was setup with one poster per frame and a manual advance. The entire thing came in around a second. I was able to advance it frame by frame and do screen caps of the individual posters. Ever since then, I've felt it was better to get everything and delete as necessary.

Thanks to everyone for your help with this.

Sometimes a bonus feature will have a "play all" version with multiple segments, and MakeMKV will only list that mpls playlist, not the individual m2ts segments files. I generally prefer to have each bonus feature segment separately, and the "play all" can also have sync errors, so that's one situation where I've just been transcoding the decrypted m2ts files into mkv with MKVToolNix.