PKCS RSA - Why do we need encoding In the RSASSA-PKCS-v1_5 signature scheme, the first step is to perform an encoding on the hashed data. (0x00||0x01||PS||0x00||T).
Is this encoding important for security ? What happens if the hash is directly encrypted without encoding ?
As per section 9 of the paper, the encoding used is required for the security of the scheme.

The encoding operation may introduce some randomness, so that
different applications of the encoding operation to the same message
will produce different encoded messages, which has benefits for
provable security.  For such an encoding method, both an encoding and
a verification operation are needed unless the verifier can reproduce
the randomness (e.g., by obtaining the salt value from the signer).
For a deterministic encoding method only an encoding operation is
needed.


Two encoding methods for signatures with appendix are employed in the
signature schemes and are specified here: EMSA-PSS and EMSA-PKCS1-
v1_5.

The paper then goes into further detail on these two encoding methods.
You would be compromising the security proof of the scheme if you did not use the encoding, however you could feasibly apply the encoding after hashing the message.  Per the paper:

Without compromising the security proof for RSASSA-PSS, one may
perform steps 1 and 2 of EMSA-PSS-ENCODE and EMSA-PSS-VERIFY (the
application of the hash function to the message) outside the
module that computes the rest of the signature operation, so that
mHash rather than the message M itself is input to the module.  In
other words, the security proof for RSASSA-PSS still holds even if
an opponent can control the value of mHash.

The fabulous answer here goes into detail regarding one attack the encoding prevents, and provides links to other attacks on wide deterministic RSA signature signature schemes.
Section 2 of the original paper by Bellare &amp; Rogaway outlines several advantages of the encoding scheme.