Serve & receive contribute 50% of your game

Indeed service and service return is very important.
Most points will end within 3 to 5 points for lower level players
A bad service return, then you are on the back foot already.

Coaching:
Table Tennis is a very complicated and complex sport. The level of understanding and skill execution is very difficult.
FH and BH strokes are the easier ones to learn.
The whole ideal to start off with the easy ones is for the player to slowly understand how to control and spin the ball and to understand footwork, body action, weight transfer, recovery and so on. Once they get better, they can understand more of spin and reading of spin.

If you are a total beginner and don't have "feel" or "touch", and can't control the spin or speed of the ball, learning to serve or service return can be pointless.

In the west, where training is a mere 10~15 hours a week, you don't have time to focus on serve or return, you would need to do it in your own time.

In Asia, it is mostly team training (min 30 hours a week), and players will all do the same drills. for younger players (since they all start very young), it is more common to focus more on the basics.
The group I am involve with, are U15~U19, they are all pretty high level already (except for maybe 10%), and the serve/return is more of a warm up drills in the training session (2.5 hours long, and there will be about a 20 mins warm up, and rotated - so some times they will be serve / return drill).

However, when comes to multi ball, ie BH flick or FH flick (serve return) is quite common to start off the drills. So we can also say, there is some training there.

There will be times for individual training where extra training can occur. Or some times you will see a player getting a box of balls with the collection net, and just practice some serves (a box is easily 200+ balls)

When during team training, but 1 on 1 drills, or when there is match play drills. I do see it often that players will ask for the same service again, to do the return better, maybe a couple of times, and when okay, to go back to the original drill.

So to sum it up, if you have 30 hours vs 15 hours.
If you have training from 6 to 19, and considered semi-pro or total amateurs.
You are bound for different kind of training (environment, style, systems)

Gozo said:

The first video really open up my eyes and mind. To a lay person who isn't exposed to sport science, my intuitive thinking is that repetition training aka block style training reinforce muscle memory and this is good for the game. And boy was I wrong as proven by scientific studies.

Prior to being exposed to the Train Ugly video, I always wondered why is that I am able to hit nice FH and BH but I completely crumbled when playing game. It is because I have been training the wrong way, or rather the inefficient way.

Thanks once again Carl for opening my eyes and mind.

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DukeGaGa said:

That doesn’t contradict what I’m saying, you can practice on your own, you just need to know how to generate spin, then you start experimenting. And if receiving is reading spin, you should also know servicing is hiding the spin, so everything you practice in a serve should be based on this. As for how much spin is on the ball, honestly you don’t need a lot if you can hide it well, but if you really want to you can just count the bounces and/or how much does the direction changes, for long balls speed is more important because it should be a surprise.

The point is, there’s nothing much a coach can teach hands on, and there isn’t really a wrong way as long as you don’t hurt yourself doing serves, so the coach only need to teach the concept and show a few demos, then it’s up to you to practice on your own, and the coach only need to check in on your progress every now and then.

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Isn't that the same coach does for top-spin, drive and push strokes? Once you get the instructional and you get a rough understanding of what is going on you keep practicing it with guys in the club and then you get check up and correct mistakes? I have never got official coaching but that is what we are doing and what I think is needed for serves, because I do believe that they are crucial, especially getting guidance on serve selection.