Those aren’t for sharpening. They’re for honing the blade. A sharp edge is thin enough to get bent out of shape during normal use, so the honing tip serves to straighten the edge, not sharpen it.

They’re fantastic if you keep your blade maintained, it’s honing, not sharpening.

Whetstones by themselves will get your blade sharp real fast, but by themselves all you’re really doing is making a micro-serrated edge every time, and it dulls fast. Smoothing your edge after whetstone with a honing rod smooths the cutting edge and reforms the edge shape after regular use.

If you lose your edge you have to start over from the whetstone, so maintaining the edge with a honing rod will save you time and not take as much material off your blade.

Also, a lot of households have utterly worn-out honing rods in their knife blocks, as the household often will try to use it for actual sharpening and scrape off a lot of the honing texture, and eventually will get so smooth they do nothing.

Yeah, honing rods bend back a bent blade edge. This can extend how long a whetstone sharpen is good for, but only by a little. They aren’t a replacement for a whetstone which does the above, and also sharpens the blade.

ok well