I didn’t find out about hypermeter until very late in my music theory learning journey. I think it should be part of the basic toolkit, especially for songwriters and improvisers. The explanation that follows might seem abstract, but behind the scenes, hypermeter provides the signposts that orient you in medium-scale musical time.
The term “hypermeter” might be new to you if you aren’t a musicologist, but I guarantee that you already intuitively know what it is. When you feel that a verse or chorus has a front half or a back half, that you can or can’t expect when the next section is going to start, or you sense that things do or don’t align with each other, that is your sense of hypermeter at work. At a club or festival, the crowd can easily feel when a 32-bar section of a repetitive dance groove is coming to an end, not because anyone is counting measures, but because of their orientation in the hypermeter.