Gait recognition, a rapidly advancing vision technology for person identification from a distance, has made significant strides in indoor settings. However, evidence suggests that existing methods often yield unsatisfactory results when applied to newly released real-world gait datasets. Furthermore, conclusions drawn from indoor gait datasets may not easily generalize to outdoor ones. Therefore, the primary goal of this paper is to present a comprehensive benchmark study aimed at improving practicality rather than solely focusing on enhancing performance. To this end, we developed OpenGait, a flexible and efficient gait recognition platform. Using OpenGait, we conducted in-depth ablation experiments to revisit recent developments in gait recognition. Surprisingly, we detected some imperfect parts of some prior methods and thereby uncovered several critical yet previously neglected insights. These findings led us to develop three structurally simple yet empirically powerful and practically robust baseline models: DeepGaitV2, SkeletonGait, and SkeletonGait++, which represent the appearance-based, model-based, and multi-modal methodologies for gait pattern description, respectively. In addition to achieving state-of-the-art performance, our careful exploration provides new perspectives on the modeling experience of deep gait models and the representational capacity of typical gait modalities. In the end, we discuss the key trends and challenges in current gait recognition, aiming to inspire further advancements towards better practicality.