[crimsonalucard]

>I prefer to create a draft quickly to build a mental model. Is my way of logging to console frequently and coding before building a mental model a junior habit that I should work on?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. There is zero research that says developing a mental model before a prototype is better (in fact research says the opposite is true). If compile times are like an hour, probably don't want to do this, but there are many languages where code to executable time is seconds.

A lot of senior engineers may disagree well, that's unfortunate, because those are the people interviewing you. They think they know better but there's literally no evidence.