Why is it important to study Lax pair in integrable system?

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I know that once we find the Lax pair $\dot{L}=[L,M]$ we could get the conserve quantities $H_k = \frac{1}{k}{\rm Tr}L^k$. But it seems that there is not general way to construct the Lax pair (e.g. in How to find a lax pair of an integrable system given the PDE or Hamiltonian? ) someone commented that

in practice, there are no general methods of computing a Lax pair for a given system of PDEs

It seems that Lax pair could only be obtained case by case. So I wonder why it lies in the center of the study of integrable system.

  1. Does Lax pairs exist (though may be hard to construct) for any integrable system?
  2. What could Lax pairs tell us about the generic feature of integrable systems, e.g. the classification of integrable systems?