I'm not exactly the right person to answer this question, but I can provide some insight. It's late, I'm drinking a beer and surfing Reddit, so I'm going to go with a simple and direct answer to your question tonight rather than write a whole essay.

Early on in the war, there were examples, like the Doolittle Raid in 1942 that were more in line with what you've characterized as "intimidation or revenge." From everything I've read and heard in lectures from other historians, this was a symbolic, fear stoking mission at best and it worked to some extent since it proved the Japanese mainland was vulnerable to attack. An aircraft carrier is temporarily moved close enough to Japan to allow American bombers to pull off a stunt attack against the Japanese. I don't think I'm familiar with any historians characterizing these earlier missions as truly strategically significant.

Flash forward to the bombing of Tokyo in 1944 and 1945. By this point the American military has secured airstrips in the Pacific capable of sustaining bombing raids on the Japanese mainland by the new B-29s. The March 1945 air raids in Tokyo were some of the most destructive in human history (including the atomic weapons later dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki). So yeah, military significance, intimidation, revenge, all of the above - it was fucking awful and terrible to the maximum degree. They don't just bomb Tokyo, they bomb many major cities.

CLEARLY the new atomic weapon needed to be considered in the discourse surrounding the destruction of the wake of WWII. As did the Holocaust. No question. But a somewhat overlooked aspect of the destruction (at least in mainstream US history textbooks) is the massive degree to which Allied forces bombed cities like Tokyo, Berlin, Dresden, and many other places. These places were symbolically important as major cities, but also because we could.

The effects of this lasted a long time, by the way. Tokyo is this big, thriving city now, right? It stagnated in economic growth in the wake of WWII for well over a decade, if I recall correctly. It virtually crushed the city for a huge chunk of the twentieth century.