Warmly recommended, yes.
I built this feature in Lix 1-2 years ago, and it's a solid broccoli feature: Hard to think of it at first, but you grow fond of it.
When you open the tile picker, if you have a tile in the level selected, the picker will start with your tile's directory, it will scroll the selection to centor on your tile, and even highlight the tile in the list. It's quick to pick similar tiles.
In Lix, I rarely switch tile directories any more with the normal directory navigation. I only do that to place a tile from a new directory for the first time in a level. It's far nicer to select a tile from the desired directory in the level first and hit the picker hotkey. It feels like I'm asking the editor: I have this tile here, I want to build more similar things, please inspire me with similar tiles.
NL's tile picker is always open, so it makes sense to introduce an extra key/click/action to trigger the feature. In theory, you could always scroll the picker to whatever tile you select in the level, but I have a weak hunch that this will be distracting. Hard to tell.
-- Simon