Maybe in the short term, and to learn the basics/conversational Chinese, however I believe in order to fully and best understand the writing system it's still best to learn how to write the characters. Plus, the deliberate act of creating the characters stroke-by-stroke seems to better implant them in my brain more than just typing out some pinyin, but maybe that's just me. Spending 5-10 minutes writing a character helps me remember the meaning and shape of it much better than an hour doing pinyin/duolingo esque practice.

But I still probably can never see myself memorizing some of the more complex characters that even native Chinese folks have problems with :P