I honed my own razors successfully for a long time before I ever thought about looking at an edge under magnification. That's something that I learned here.
Magnification does two things for me:
1. Tells me when to stop. I'm sure that I did way too many laps before.
2. Quickly identifies problems that I previously couldn't really figure out. Points me to the part of the blade needing attention. Before, I just kept honing until all was well.
Since I know what a good edge looks like, I really don't need more than 10x to do what I need to do.