I think it comes down to what you're optimizing for, but disagree that stroke order is essential for learning to read. Like ddevault, I learned the jouyou kanji

I think it comes down to what you're optimizing for, but disagree that stroke order is essential for learning to read. Like ddevault, I learned the jouyou kanji and some extras almost entirely without stroke order. I've never even tried to handwrite most of the kanji I know because I almost exclusively care about being able to read printed text, especially in contexts where tooling isn't available (image-format scans of paper things, inside old games, etc). This is obviously anecdotal, but not having ever written most of the kanji/radicals I know didn't seem to hurt me much outside of having terrible handwriting (in the handful of occasions I ever have to handwrite in Japanese, the fact that I'm doing it at all seems to override nitpicks) and sometimes struggling to read sloppy/highly stylized handwriting (which is a valid issue). If you enjoy handwriting/learning for learning's sake more power to you, but learning stroke order isn't necessarily an integral part of learning kanji if you don't mind the tradeoffs involved.