Personally I really agree with @lorentz , I remember this topic coming up in this post too: Definitions for functional (grammar) Hanzi - #10 by damia
While I understand limiting the scope and the focus on characters (especially when the whole vocabulary part is still very underdeveloped, I feel I’m learning words as they get added already 
), I think learning more common words in which the hanzi appears is very useful, especially if it involves different meaning and pronunciations.
I don’t consider I really learned a hanzi if I don’t know some of it’s most common meanings and pronunciations, so to me not learning that feels like a pretty big gap in the curriculum too.
Other than that, I do think that the ultimate goal of learning hanzi is learning how to read and for that you need to learn as many words as possible. I understand this is about characters, but the process of learning new words in these steps (component->hanzi->word) is so efficient that it’s a bit of a shame to leave it half-way. Even if it’s more efficient to learn vocabulary through reading/watching tv, having it here wouldn’t hurt at all.
It also makes the studying of new items more palatable: learning a new character takes a lot of effort, while learning a new vocabulary out of characters you already know not so much. If the proportion is similar to the one in WK, in which you have 3x vocabulary compared to characters, new lessons are less overwhelming because it’s not all completely new stuff.