In my experience as a working mathematician, intuition is crucial.
But I don’t know if my experience is universal (e.g. there are mathematicians with different types of thinking, e.g. algebraic thinking vs geometric thinking is an often quoted dichotomy).
My priors do point towards intuition always being super-useful (and also towards intuition usually being somewhat easier to develop than purely mechanistic skills). But my mechanistic skills have always been so-so, people might differ from each other in a rather radical fashion...
In my experience as a working mathematician, intuition is crucial.
But I don’t know if my experience is universal (e.g. there are mathematicians with different types of thinking, e.g. algebraic thinking vs geometric thinking is an often quoted dichotomy).
My priors do point towards intuition always being super-useful (and also towards intuition usually being somewhat easier to develop than purely mechanistic skills). But my mechanistic skills have always been so-so, people might differ from each other in a rather radical fashion...