Whether it's okay to ignore word order really depends on your goals. In my work, tracking word order to build a sentence representation is necessary to get composition rules correct. You can get away with ignoring order surprisingly often but when it's needed, it's vital. When aggregated across an entire corpus, order ends up mattering a lot, in an absolute sense (something looking only at accuracy numbers will hide).

Compare the following:

1) You must state the benefit.

2) You must benefit the state.

3) Feed fish vs. Fish feed.

Sometimes limits in inference:

1) A loves B.

2) Cats eat fish.

3) Cats are mammals.

Sometimes the sequence preceding or following will be important:

1) Problems with learning

2) Learning with problems

3) It has a learning problem

4) A learning problem for it.

Or consider an example from:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2335962_How_Well_Ca...

1) It was not the sales manager who hit the bottle that day, but the office worker with the serious drinking problem.

2) That day the office manager, who was drinking, hit the problem sales worker with the bottle, but it was not serious.

Order ends up mattering when you want to capture nuance or power higher order inference.