At the time, it was not at all clear that in-orbit rendezvous would be feasible. One of the reasons this is so important is that it enabled lunar orbit rendezvous.
I celebrated when I made my first rendezvous in Kerbal Space Program. It's not easy to do and knowing that it was done in real life with tougher constraints was awe-inspiring.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 19.2 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit_rendezvous
This drastically reduced the total launch mass for the Apollo missions.