How important are meta descriptions?

TLDR;

Using meta descriptions is certainly not a bad practice, but they are hardly the critical element that they once were. Mainly because of people keyword stuffing their meta descriptions. The search engines are smart enough to read your page content. Make sure your page content is good and leave the meta descriptions for any SEO fine tuning.

Source: https://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/meta-data-seo