It depends on what exactly you mean by "redundant". Take a simple sentence for example:
1) "I hugged you"
If we were to remove the past tense marking, "-ed", from the verb, we would get:
2) "I hug you"
If we did not have any morphological distinctions, then we would have ambiguous utterances between the tenses. It is not clear to me how, in the absence of a past tense suffix, you could get a past tense meaning from (2).
Chinese does not use verb tenses, or the verb "to be" I understand, causing listeners to have to figure out timing by context. But verb tenses are deeply ingrained in English.
Yes, we can decode the meaning, but it makes the speaker sound uneducated as the result of using "bad grammar", thus lowering credibility.
Note that when AI translates Chinese into English, it generally translates as present tense, even when the text is clearly talking about something in the past or the future.
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