Suboptimal - likely. There is some utility: a green letter is more useful than a yellow. Checking for a in two locations when a is a very commonly used letter is __useful__. Still likely much more useful to check for the presence of a fifth letter than a chance at knowing more precisely the location of an a.
There seems to be a progression of Wordle strategies.
Playing with a set start word (or words, e.g. "SIREN OCTAL DUMPY" or people who go the "AUDIO ADIEU" route).
(Many people also go down the rabbit hole of looking for "optimal" starting words or choices based on the original word lists.)
Then, once you've played that for a while, you find it's not that much of a challenge unless you end up in one of the forms of madness like _A_E_, and you'll switch to playing in "hard code" (e.g. correct/green must be played again in the same place in all subsequent tries, yellow letters must also be reused each time).
The hard mode starting with the same word gets a bit boring, so people move on to varying the start word each day, either pulling them from a list or just using the answer for the day before.
There's no "correct" approach obviously, people can play the game however they want and extract the fun/anger however they want.
Because a wordle-in-one is meaningless. It doesn't mean you're any good at Wordle, the way a hole-in-one suggests you're good at golf. It definitely doesn't mean that you're a "Genius" as the game puts it, because you were operating with zero information and didn't employ any skill or intuition. It just means you burned some luck points on something that doesn't matter.
I used to use “stare” or “stale” as the starting guess when I played Wordle, thinking you’d want to start off with the most common letters, like R-S-T-L-N-E from Wheel of Fortune.
