It all depends on how minimal you want to go. I own three pairs of footwear. An everyday pair that I use for everything from walking to work to mowing, a more formal pair for special occasions, and a pair of work boots I use for a variety of other circumstances--dirty work, times I need waterproof footwear, felling trees, they'd work for hiking but are heavy, if I want something warm in winter (where I put on an extra pair of thick socks). If I was in a different circumstance I might be able to get by with less, but the lesson I take home from the minimalism movement (which I'm not a part of) isn't that I should have the bare minimum of stuff; it's that I should consider having have less stuff and should be more mindful of why I have the things I do.

So if you're hiking a lot and sneakers don't cut it, go ahead and get something that does. But applying the lesson above, if you think about it and you hike only occasionally and it's on easy terrain and sneakers really are good enough, then don't buy the hiking gear that might make those easy hikes 1% better. That 1% comes at a cost of A) the purchase price itself, and B) having more stuff in your life to deal with. Yeah, it's nice to have sweet gear even in those circumstances, but it doesn't really make life appreciably better. Overall, cumulatively, such purchases make life worse.