Is this really necessary? When I took piano lessons as a kid, I never had a hard time reading the music. It looks really complicated knowing nothing and jumpi

Is this really necessary? When I took piano lessons as a kid, I never had a hard time reading the music. It looks really complicated knowing nothing and jumping straight to Beethoven, but realistically, you'll learn to read sheet music a lot faster than you'll learn to actually play it. I only took lessons for a few years, but by the end I was able to read sheet music that I had no hope of actually playing. And then there's hundreds of years of music using the existing notation, so anybody serious about music will inevitably end up learning the old notation anyway.