I won’t flame. I’ll give you history and fact.
Short answer? Yes. Look at a 1944 map of Saxony. All the rail lines merge in Dresden. The main yards and Hauptbahnnhaus were right smack in the center of the city.
Germans were using those rail lines to reinforce the Russian front.
Dresden “china” was world-famous as pottery, but how many know that the Wehrmacht used the ceramics from the Dresden potteries to make mine covers?
Zeiss Optikal had their corporate HQ and main plant there. The same Zeiss Optikal that made gunsights for the new ME-262 and HE-178 jet fighters, and periscopes for Kriegsmarine U-Boats.
Churchill personally asked it be hit, and NO ONE said, “No” to him.
Finally, the Soviets were less than 50 miles away, and Churchill was having serious misgivings about Comrade Stalin. he wanted a formerly-intact German city on the Eastern Front leveled to show Stalin and the Reds what the RAF and USAAF were capable of doing and to watch THEIR step.
BTW, the bomb loads were the same as any other raid. Alt Markt Dresden was just old, intact, and very wooden......
I have less than zero empathy or sympathy for what happened to ANY German or Japanese city during that war. They got just what they asked for.
Goebbels asked for “Total War”, and he got it.
If it wasn’t for Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Dresden would have been just another bombing mission.