Is it worth learning the SVG path attribute, or should I use a tool for drawing?

Here is a page with a bunch of tutorials in SVG, one of them about Paths.

I used it to draw a lot of circles with the help of a program, and to my surprise, there is a core circle definition in SVG which is much more simple, than what Inkscape produces when I draw them by hand.

But Inkscape was fine in reading that format and drew what I expected. Just on saving the file it added its own boilerplate.

So I would recommend to learn from such tutorials and not (just) from the SVG inspector view inkscape offers.