It doesn't need root, but it is shady as fuck. Thankfully, there's been no reports of malware from the official lucky patcher project... although that link doesn't look official, given the ads and popups, I got that link from my copy of the app.

I briefly looked into the revanced project to see if they had any relevant patches, as I would rather recommend FOSS solutions first, and revanced is shaping up to be lucky patcher, but FOSS, but they didn't have anything,