They do benefit from visually distinct characters. They've been optimized for thousands of years and the ones that were hard to recognize morphed or were dropped. That's why recognizing radicals is just a clue rather than a rigid system (similar to how English spelling works).

In the case of brahmic scripts (disclaimer: I only learned the Marathi alphabet as a child) you don't "read" the characters any more than you do in English, but rather look at the word shapes.

There is continual evolution: in high school we studied Greek with word spacing just like modern English; I was shocked at hard it was to read original inscriptions without word spacing (and some old texts that were boustrophedon). I also thought it would be really hard to read German highway signs, but after a while (less than a year) I started to automatically break the compounds into meaningful chunks while zooming down the road.

We have an end result of a process of: consistent writing direction > spacing > punctuation > increased discrimination of letterforms (introduction of the minuscule) > regularization of spelling

Typography matters in all these languages. It's not just letterforms: word and sentence spacing varies among English, French and Russian, for instance.

Reading really exploits some deep structures in the brain. Articles like these, to me, implicitly say more about neurology than culture.