I think your point makes sense, but the comparison of programming to swimming loses the thread of thought a bit. Swimming is not my forte, but there are books by professional marathoners on how to train for marathons, for example, that are valuable to read for forming proper training plans as opposed to "just figuring it out".
I think your opinion on OSS/large codebases makes sense, but I don't think it's an either/or situation: reading should _support_ actual coding, similar to how studying a grammar textbook for a foreign language is there to support actually speaking/listening/communicating in that language.
Can you show me such a book? Ie a book that teaches one to swim (different strokes etc) aimed at a professional swimmer (athlete).