Others (sample size currently = 2) here have said either that they studied them carefully or felt that the text itself conveyed the important information. I'm in the first camp. The maps gave a stronger sense of the world in which the story was set; the geographical counterpart to the historic and linguistic context presented in the appendices.

For me, like many other aspects of TLoTR, what is also interesting is how the maps grew along with the story itself. For Tolkien, the maps were an important part of the story’s development, for example allowing a sanity check on the distances travelled by the characters, or the direction in which the Moon might rise. Tolkien himself had a large heavily annotated working map (which still exists and is on display in the ongoing Tolkien exhibition) which was redrawn by his son to create a print-ready copy for publication.

https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/fantasy-maps.html