We are physical, sensory beings living in physical sensory bodies and
that is how we navigate the world. If you want your readers to live
inside your story, not just be told about events from a distance, you
have to give them a physical sensory world to live inside. And that
means describing it.
Description often gets a bad rep in writing, accused of "bogging the story down" or "swathes of unnecessary description" - as if description had no part in story or were always, by definition, unnecessary. We might feel like that now about some nineteenth-century novels. When I was sixteen, I taught my brother and his two best friends their final-year setwork, Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (oh, the things we do for love, or at least for teenage crushes on brothers' friends) and the endlessly eloquent descriptions of fields drove all three boys beserk with frustration. Even for the literature-loving younger sister, three pages on one vista was hard to stomach. So yes, all that rhapsodising about a single "featureless convexity of chalk and soil" may well feel unnecessary and bog the story down, to a contemporary reader, or at least in a contemporary book. A total lack of description, however, is just as bad, if not worse.
