I am done with semi-slick tires for now
For a while I was running semi-slick tires (Gravelkings) on my bike. It's an "everything" bike for me - it has a lot of attachment points for racks and bags so that I can use it for both grocery shopping and for overnight trips, like the one I did to Catalina Island. It has bigger tires so that I can take it on gravel, into parks, and up into the hills. However, I mostly use it for commuting and getting road miles coverage. So the big tires are most often useful to me on extremely bad roads or gravel alleyways. I'm using gravel tires to bike on human-made gravel, haha.
But I was using semi-slicks - bike tires without knobs, but with a texture all over the tire to help it grip on looser terrain. I'm done with that now! I've been having way too many punctures.
If a tire has knobs, then as the tire rolls, the knobs create numerous small air gaps between the tire and the road - or, at the very least, numerous places where the tire's casing is pushed less firmly against the road, thanks to the knobs in the way. This makes it less likely that a piece of glass or metal will cut deeply into the tire and puncture the tube inside. Riding a knobbly tire on a paved road can make you slower, but for most people who ride a bike as part of their day-to-day life (rather than as training for a race or something), the difference is not meaningful.
This is why I tell people it's not completely ridiculous to use the mountain bike you purchased, aspirationally, from Walmart or REI as a commuter machine. The frame geometry isn't ideal, but at the very least you can probably ride it around in the gutter on all the nasty car debris there without getting as many punctures as you otherwise would.
I got a puncture on my very first bike ride of the month a few weeks ago, and when I finally took a close look at the tire last week to see if there was anything else I could do to repair it, I realized that the tire is basically cobwebs. Those semi-slick surfaces have really been tortured by the road. I got boots in there like nobody's business - including at least one boot on a huge cut I'd straight up forgotten about. And there's much tinier cuts all over the place. I'm pretty sure my latest puncture was not from a new cut, but from debris working its way into an old cut and widening it or getting around one of my janky tire boots. But at this point the rubber has lasted me two years and many thousands of miles, so it's not crazy to replace it. I've ordered some gravel tires with a lot more knobs on them.
A lot of the bike purchases people make are aspirational, like those mountain bikes from REI. You get the stuff you need to do the stuff you want to do, not the stuff you actually end up doing. I wanted to zoom around faster on the pavement, so I got myself the pavement tires, and now I have made peace with this ambition. I'm not actually ever going to be fast. So I'm getting myself knobbly tires and setting my ambitions in a different place (more dirt).
Will I actually accomplish anything these tires unlock for me? Maybe not. I definitely hope it reduces the amount of time I spend at the side of the road with a patch kit, though.