A happily-spinning bar is pretty necessary for a guy with no squat rack or stands. Every lift that involves taking the bar from the floor to the shoulders or back involves a clean.
The good Lord created lumber scraps for the sole purpose of making small platforms for floor-based lifts using non-regulation-height weights. Or you could just do the lifts with odd-height iron 10s and 25s and not worry about it. I highly doubt a grown man will suffer injury lifting less than 135 lbs from a deeper deadlift position.
I do my cleaning these days with bumper plates because they are available to me, but they are absolutely unnecessary unless you are finding a 1-rep clean or snatch max and are at risk of dropping lots of weight in a place where noise is not welcome. The bulk of my clean and snatch work the last 20 years has been with iron plates. The noise of a couple of 45s on either end freaks people out at the gym, and they stay safely far away by the dumbbells and benches, leaving the squat rack and all the floor space behind it to me. I've not missed and dropped a clean in 16 or so years - at a time where low-rep sets near max weight was needed for training.
I think Crossfit invented bar-dropping from the clean and snatch catch positions at sub-maximal weights, hence the recent interest in such. You used to only see bumper plates at a college athletics gym.
