[Al-Khwarizmi]

> I had a blast and found that teaching helped me understand the fundamentals of my fields at an extremely deep level that I'd never reached otherwise

You spent 5 years teaching a class that, judging from your words, you probably prepared and improved very thoroughly. That is a lot of hours of work. Are you sure if you devoted all those hours to reading textbooks, papers, doing experiments, etc. on your field, you wouldn't have achieved an even deeper understanding?

Maybe yes, but if so, I honestly think you're in a minority. As an academic myself, I like teaching and I do learn things from it, but it's far from the most efficient way to learn a scientific field. If I had a pure research position I'm pretty sure that my research productivity would be better.