As unsightly and in-the-way as they are, you need to have your Show/Hide Characters displayed when editing your work.
It’s essential that you can see what’s going on in your document when you’re editing, deleting, and doing all the myriad of things that we do with our documents.
If you don’t show hidden characters and you accidentally delete a section break, then your document can behave in ways that you wouldn’t imagine.
Similarly, if you delete or move a paragraph to which an image has been anchored or locked, then it might cause issues you’re unaware of.
(Remember Ctrl+Z is your best friend with Word and mistakes.)
Next Steps
My Free Introduction to Microsoft Word course is here.