It's not necessary and as a native german it is something i can totally live with if foreigners get it wrong in conversations. Even people with years of being fluent in germany still ocassionally screw them up. In a similar way i always struggle pronouncing words like "caffeine, beard, deteriorate" etc after years of speaking english at work.
It's all the same (ie. using "die" and the plural cases)
In Spanish or French for eg. you still have gender marks (los/Las for eg.) with the plural form but in German, it's all the same.
That makes me wonder why it's so necessary to have genders in the first place since the German plural doesn't have marks of it and it doesn't hurt understanding.