I struggle to see how this "doesn't matter" while also agreeing with you that it's a super cool property. Especially for someone coming from an alphabetic language background.

Logograms allow you to understand (some) meaning without understanding pronunciation.

Syllabaries and alphabets allow you to understand pronunciation (to varying degrees of success depending on spelling consistency) without necessarily understanding meaning.

It's all tradeoffs.

These days I read Chinese much better than Japanese, and it's definitely fun that I can look at a page full of Japanese and understand the meaning of many words just from knowing the (largely parallel) meaning of the kanji / Hanzi from Chinese.

Conversely, I can read (the sounds of) Hangul, but I rightly know about 20 Korean words, so it's all just sounds to me.

But I can read the name off of a Korean hotel sign and communicate it to a Korean taxi driver. I can't do the same in Japan if I don't know the pronunciation, even if I know exactly what the sign means. If it affects your ability to use the language effectively to achieve what you want then I think it matters.

Names and particularly place names are on a whole other level. Especially stuff that's written in a font other than the standard, nicely formatted text you're used to reading.

While I can sometimes guess the meaning of a novel word based on context of the sentence and the meaning of Kanji alone, the vast majority of the time I can't. So... I disagree.