I'm not sure what you mean by menial coding but all my employers have supported this in the past. This was a variety of companies, big tech, startups, etc. I think its more likely your employer is the outlier.
All the companies I've worked at implicitly assume that you're supposed to use your working hours for more than just coding, including learning what you need for the task at hand, although if you're looking at very beginner material that might raise some suspicion.
In the case I mentioned above, the company wanted me to build a search engine before elastic search existed, and before there was full-text search in popular dbs like Postgres or MySQL. The CTO/founder gave me his credit card and told me to buy whatever books I needed. I bought about 5 different relevant books. Work days were about 10-12hrs, they still wanted me to read/research on my own time
In 35 years in the industry, reading and studying during work hours were always supported. Frankly, most places would let us play video games during work hours as long as we met our deadlines.
I've had mandated gaming on Friday after lunch. But this was in the gaming industry so it's "market research"!
We also often played board games. My favourite was playing secret Hitler with my team that one time. That was fun! (I managed to become "untouchable" while also being Hitler. That's a memorable moment!)
Interestingly, the person at Microsoft states in a reply that even most of them have to pick this up in their spare time. Judging from other replies, it seems that there are quite some differences in how companies approach this.
What I meant with "menial coding" is those jobs where people have to submit TPS reports on how much hours they spend for each customer. Reading a paper such as this one [1] is typically not directly necessary for being a good frontend developer, but it might stimulate someone to develop into a more fruitful employee in the long run. Managers would have to explain to their customer why time is being spent on that, and that requires some vision and creativity, which is not always a given.
No company I’ve worked at has ever had dedicated time for reading papers or articles
Maybe I’ve only worked at outliers?