Treating Reading as Secondary, Mixed Opinions

I’ll probably get downvoted here, but I mainly learn languages for speaking and listening … I once asked about my struggles with learning Chinese because of the hanzi, and everyone advised me to not focus on reading/writing and focus more on speaking/listening. And then conversely, I also once asked about my struggles with using the Thai transliteration system (instead of learning to read the alphabet) and people gave me flak for not learning to read.

I’ll be honest, unless I’m going REALLY in depth with a language, if the language does not already use the Latin alphabet (or one I already know, like Cyrillic or Arabic or Devanagari), then I don’t care about reading/writing at first and feel it distracts from speaking and listening. My goals in Thai are not to read a novel or write a letter, I want to communicate on the street and be able to talk to people and get around and do simple business topics. I justify this by noting that plenty of people throughout history (actually probably most people), in most societies have been illiterate and they always spoke the language.

Should I feel guilty about this? Is my approach incorrect? If I l, for example, were to be in Japan for a few months, I would only focus on speaking/listening and not bother with reading and writing at all. A year or more, then yes, I would learn to read or write, but not otherwise.