But do you read them in the echo area? I disabled tooltip-mode, but
I'm not used to move my eyes up and down between the mouse pointer
somewhere in the buffer to the corresponding tooltip displayed in the
echo area. This is really inconvenient, IMHO. So turning off
tooltip-mode means that I won't have any use of them: too much eye
work to read them down there!
(I'm surprised that it is a big difference (for me) between moving the
eyes from left to right over a distance of about 70 characters (i.e.,
reading -> easy) and moving the eyes up and down over a distance of
about 43 rows (i.e., reading the tooltips of toolbar icons in the echo
area -> uncomfortable).)