Because so much earlier Daoist material was lost, in the 1281 Yuan burning and in less dramatic episodes of neglect, warfare and simple manuscript decay across the centuries before and after it, the Zhengtong Daozang functions in modern scholarship as the primary surviving textual basis for studying the Daoist tradition as a whole, not merely its Ming dynasty state. Texts that do not appear in this canon, or that survive only in fragments quoted elsewhere, represent a real and permanent gap in the historical record that the Zhengtong compilation, however extensive, could not fully close.
Modern critical study of Daoism relies on the Zhengtong Daozang and its 1607 supplement as its base text, working to identify the likely date, authorship and textual history of the individual works it contains, since the canon itself preserves material composed across more than a thousand years without always making clear when or by whom a given text was written.
The compilation stands, alongside comparable canon-fixing projects in other traditions, as an example of how a religious tradition's surviving scripture can depend heavily on a small number of deliberate, well resourced compilation efforts undertaken centuries after the material's original composition, each shaped by the concerns and losses of its own particular historical moment.