Like many people in the mountainous rural area where I live I've been using a wood stove as my primary heat source to warm my home for decades. While it is a lot of hard work to heat with cordwood, it has many benefits and pleasures. For one thing it is much less costly to burn than fossil fuels and it is a sustainable, renewable energy source. In my case, my house is surrounded by thousands and thousands of acres of (primarily deciduous) forest. My property alone would produce many lifetimes worth of heating fuel for my home. Wood heat is also essentially carbon neutral. Whether you burn hardwood logs to heat your home or the logs rots on the forest floor, the same amount of carbon dioxide is released to the atmosphere where it is eventually reabsorbed from the atmosphere via the process of photosynthesis. Unlike coal or oil, wood is part of the natural carbon cycle as it has been for millennia from burning (forest fires) or rotting. If coal and oil had been left in the ground for the same period of time the carbon overload in our atmosphere would not exist as it does today. Granted, if everyone, everywhere were to burn wood for heating (and cooking) there would be problems much as we see in some parts of the world where forests are stripped bare and the air is virtually unbreathable. Still, in some communities where forests are properly managed, wood is sustainably harvested and burning is done efficiently, it can be and is a very viable energy source.
Wood heat is not perfect by any means. It can release quite a lot of particulate matter into the air and the harvesting and transport of wood requires fossil fuels. Here in the US wood heating appliance (space and water) emission regulations have been phased in over a period of years (with some stricter ones now kicking in during 2020). There are both federal wood appliance emission regulations as well as (sometimes stricter) state requirements. Some of this is achieved with the use of catalytic converters and also with cleverly engineered burning schemes. The stove I use is controlled via bimetallic thermostat and it has secondary and tertiary smoke chambers. After smoke leaves the primary firebox, air is carefully introduced into the heated ancillary chambers where the heated gases and smoke reignite before leaving the stove and entering the chimney. I also have an oil furnace which I use for backup and during the off season when wood heat would otherwise be overkill. I also use propane to heat my studio, but that's another story.
Many people here are converting to the use of wood pellets. It is attractive because it is very convenient and it can be burned efficiently without having to pay much attention to what you are doing. One doesn't have to be bothered with selecting, seasoning, moving and stacking cordwood and it doesn't take much knowledge, experience or skill to run the appliance efficiently and safely. It is also less messy when it comes to dealing with bark chips or ash disposal.
I'm not a fan of wood pellets however. For one thing, wood pellets require a lot of fossil fuel to produce, far more than cutting and harvesting cord wood logs. Much of the efficiency you may gain by burning pellets is really being outsourced to a remote location. Another thing that is a deal breaker for me is that wood pellet stoves require electricity to operate. The stoves use electricity to continuously feed the pellets into the firebox and some of them also have built in fans to circulate the air.
Where I live, kind of out in the middle of nowhere, it is not uncommon for the power to go out periodically. Usually that's no big deal and the power is restored quickly but on some occasions due to extreme weather we have lost power for days at a time. We've had several winter ice storms over the years where I have been without power for as much as a week. During the last ice storm the electric meters were torn right off the side of my house! Thankfully, I have my wood stove to keep the house toasty warm during such disasters. I can even cook on the wood stove if need be. So, for me, my traditional wood stove is a vital survival tool when needed as I would be in dire circumstances without it. I also have an 8kW propane powered standby generator for when I need it but that source of electricity is impractical to run full time for extended periods of time, so during extended power outages I'll run it for several hours at a time, morning and evening to keep my freezer frozen, run my well pump to recharge my water tank, wash dishes and also to get a hot shower.