Why forge instead of grind

A stock-removal knife starts as a flat bar and has everything that is not a knife cut away. It is a completely legitimate way to make an excellent blade, and plenty of the best knives in the world are made that way.

Forging starts with a smaller bar and moves the steel. The distal taper is drawn out rather than ground in, so the material that would have become swarf ends up in the spine and the tip instead. The grain follows the shape it was pushed into rather than being cut across at the edge.

Does that make it objectively better? On a modern powder steel with a good heat treat, honestly, not by much. What forging buys you is control over mass distribution that is hard to reach any other way, and the ability to make things — integrals, drawn-out points, forge finishes — that stock removal cannot.

It also has no undo. You can grind a mistake off a stock-removal blade. A forging error is in the steel.