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Although the current trend is towards to accept multiple character representations (e.g., 木 with/without hane are both correct),
the old trend is still left, so they (hane/tome/harai) are still important:
Thank you! The pages you linked are really useful to me.
I'm sure someone with more experience can weigh in better than me. From my understanding, they are important to a degree, even outside of calligraphy, where of course they are very important.
Handwriting will start to deteriorate as people write faster and more sloppily. However, if they use the correct stroke types, it will deteriorate in a more predictable manner. I'm gonna be honest here, I do personally not pay attention to the stroke types, but for example if you look at "tome" vs. "harai", doing stop pen -> lift pen means it's way less likely for there to be a faint line from the end of one stroke to the start of the next one, as would often happen after sloppily writing a "harai" stroke.
This is the same reason why stroke order (and direction) is very important when it comes to legibility of handwriting.
I think it's important for handwriting, but how often do you actually handwrite anything these days? You can read or type just fine without it.
That’s a good point. I think you'll be fine most of the time, but there are still some cases where you have to write manually. For example, when filling out registration forms.
I actually forgot about paper forms, but true! Depending on how much time you have, you could probably get away with using a dictionary, but having a few common characters or radicals memorised would probably be better.