yes, but you missed an essential step of the process: apt handles dependencies for you. maybe not in this case, but installing .debs directly requires installing dependencies manually and it’s not uncommon for people to forget about this and then saying that the program does not work.
installing from an apt repo is always better as long as the repo is trusted (and it should be if you’re installing .debs from it anyway) because it handles dependencies and updates automatically. If you just install the .deb, you’ll have to repeat the process per each update.