Pretty much. It helps with giving language and notation to particular sounds. It condenses sounds to something you can write down and communicate, without having to think of each note individually.
It’s like design patterns for music. Not necessarily prescriptive (it’s your music, do whatever you want), but helpful for reducing music into something more concrete.
It has helped me a lot in learning (classical) music. It’s also kind of like watching a sport where you understand the rules vs. one you don’t - knowing the “rules” helps you engage more, and peek into the composer’s mind, or give you ideas for your own compositions.
That's likely to be true even if/when we improve "music theory" to cover much more than 18th century European harmonic forms.