Now that Unity provides a visual interface for developing shaders, how important would you guys say it is to understand how to manually/traditionally develop shaders?
necessary for any valuable optimization and lower-level flexibility, IIRC in the LWRP/URP some things you can’t access (stencil buffer)
coding skill offers middle-ware agility; your work/capabilities exist outside Unity and compiled graphs are a mess of irreversible jargon – if you can code you’ll be able to work in and out of software, jot down quick ideas in an email and pass snippets with others
…all said. i can’t write them, wish I could, so I have to use the graph
Considering a ton of stuff just isnt possible with shadergraph still I would also learn how to actually write them.
That said given the current state of SRP, I would avoid it altogether for now. I know, I know, it was meant to be usable already by this point. But unforunately that has proven simply not true 
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Being a hobbyist, I consider myself a jack of all trades. That being said, programming is one of the disciplines I enjoy the most in regards to game development and I certainly spend the majority of my time doing it; programming is probably my strongest skill at this time but I haven’t really starting working with shaders yet.
Do either of you know of any unity official tutorials that can introduce me to coding shaders from the ground up?
Does unity offer official documentation to its API for shaders?