Am I learning kanji ineffectively?

I’ve realized that a lot of people study kanji separately from vocabulary. I never did this because I don’t care about handwriting. When I learn vocab, I just look at the word and check whether I can recall its pronunciation and have a general sense of its meaning. If I can, I move on, if not, I review it again.

I recently finished Kaishi 1.5k (an Anki deck with the 1,500 most common words), and now I’m sentence mining. Vocabulary is starting to feel easier because I’m recognizing patterns between kanji. I’ve never studied radicals, and I don’t know any of them, so I’m wondering whether I should keep doing what I’m doing or start studying radicals as well. Would that make learning vocab easier?

For example, if I close my eyes, I can’t even picture very basic kanji like the one in 食べる, yet I can read it instantly. With more complicated words in Anki, I sometimes struggle to notice the differences between similar looking kanji, but most of the time I rely on the overall “vibe” the word gives me. Is this a viable way of learning, or would studying kanji and radicals more explicitly be better?