Is there any point keeping my laptop's recovery partition?

Well If I understand you correctly, your hard drive is loosing clusters. You hard drive is crashing and needs to be replaced. Loosing cluster and the data in them will cause all kinds of weird behavior.

Hello All, I left the recovery partitions are they were. Indeed they were not empty. And, although I see no need to keep the OEM Windows 8 files from 2013, I can delete them later. We do not use our whole hard disks anyway as we have our media on a NAS server.

What I have done though was to follow the tutorial from DavidY about creating provisioning packages. I then made new recovery USBs using 32GB sticks. For PCs with quite a number of Steam games on them, the 32GB was not enough. So I had the family members delete games that they were not using anymore until I could get the recoveries onto the 32GB sticks. I guess I could have procured some 64GB sticks. But it was time for some clean-up anyway.