Glad to hear you’ve found something that works for you! I think what you describe would work for most students, and I generally think that basing lessons off reading and/or listening is great. That means that the student can spend as much time as they want leading up to the lesson, learning the basic stuff, and then when they get to the lesson, they are ready to talk about it, contrast it, nuance it, vary it and so on. It also provide a natural topic for each lesson, and if you as a student choose the material, it also has a high degree of autonomy, which is great.

Yes, that’s why it’s important to know what your goals are! With the goals that most students have (which are communicative in some way), I don’t think that learning stroke names as a beginner is an efficient use of time. If your main goal is to learn characters, though, then it makes sense to learn the stroke names sooner rather than later. Still, I cant help but thinking that going through stroke order in class is very inefficient. With computers and phones, it’s so easy to look up and teacher could have done something else which you can’t do yourself (such as spending more time checking your characters, for example).

To reinforce your theme that students have differing needs, I’ll question your disapproval of teaching stroke names to beginners. My first encounter with Mandarin came in a Coursera course about Chinese characters, and I’m sure that I’ll always have the instructor’s voice in my head saying heng, shu, pie, and the rest of the names.

Some HSK textbooks also expose beginners to Mandarin grammatical terms. I don’t think that I’m making a mistake by learning those at any early stage. Other (maybe most) people may choose not to learn them.