[themodelplumber]

What I'm saying regarding rote drills is, when you tell a theorist that developing a model by yourself isn't interesting or helpful to you, their only other thought is, "you must be one of those weirdos who benefits from rote learning?"

Project-based learning simply doesn't come to their mind; it's completely off their radar because it is, as op implies, potentially full of little all-consuming rabbit holes that are unrelated to the CS principles in question. Look at the great theorist Feynman and his "computer disease" theory. He had a deep aversion to getting sucked into things like IT concerns, because theoretical model-detecting was his core motivator.

[jacobolus]

Feynman was complaining about something different. He was in the middle of working on large-scale projects and got annoyed that his coworkers got completely distracted by irrelevant (but amusing) tangents instead of doing their next task that everyone else was blocking on.

This is a problem of the coworker’s lack of executive planning / control / time management skills, not anything about learning via projects or theorizing. Arguably if the coworker had done a bit more project-based learning he would have better practiced those skills.