The odds I will ever learn to use a waterstone or strop are nil. A Chef’s Choice manual sharpener is really easy and makes my knives plenty sharp enough to cut tomatoes.
Yeah they work fine too. The point is not that you need stones to sharpen knives at all, but you don't need insanely expensive glass or diamond stones like the YouTubers tend to tell you to get to shaving-sharp if you want to.
Just don't use a sharpener with the carbide v-blades that shave off slivers of metal or you'll get a knife with a concave edge that doesn't meet the board along the whole length and that really is a pain to fix (related note on that, a kitchen knife edge up in a vice is quite a disconcerting thing!).
I'd very strongly recommend vs the waterstone. Use a ceramic or diamond one. The strop is not required but it's nice.
Sharpening knives is quite the therapeutic process, at least it was for me when I learned to do them. Now I can sharpen knives at the bottom of a tea cup or even a brick.
To answer the question, there is an infinite number of things I can do with my time. Learning that particular manual skill, especially when there is a very simple alternative, just doesn’t seem worthwhile to me.
