Is keyword research really that important in the beginning?

Yep, I’m in the same boat. I started by checking GSC for drops since mid‑November and looked at pages that fell in traffic. I fixed obvious issues on a few posts, sharpened the internal links, and tried to improve ones with thin content. It’s slow, but I’m waiting 4–6 weeks for Google to recrawl. For a newbie like me, that’s been enough to learn where to focus next.

It depends what you are making your site about. If your site is an article site, (shouldn't be) then you spend loads of hours and even weeks studying something that ultimately isn't up to you when you about who decides your site should be where in rankings.

I put my keyword as the domain name on a site, and thats it, started with 1k+ traffic monthly, regular subscribing accounts, and haven't looked back... (interactive gallery site, not a article site)

if no one’s searching those topics you’ll struggle to grow. best approach is write first then quickly check if there’s demand and tweak it.