> This strategy is equally effective for most things in life.
Not if we understand 'effective' to also mean 'cost & time effective'
You'd learn a lot by building a nuclear reactor from first principles, but it's not the most effective way to develop an intuition about how one operates.
I think you want to talk about whether the strategy is efficient, which I agree it is not. However, if you already tried understanding several general descriptions and it didn't work out, implementing something from scratch is an inefficient but effective way of really grokking it.
Not if we understand 'effective' to also mean 'cost & time effective'
You'd learn a lot by building a nuclear reactor from first principles, but it's not the most effective way to develop an intuition about how one operates.