I think project based learning is the only way to actually learn programming. It's why most people suggest new programmers to "just build something they want" (which I think is bad advice). It's easy to envision a person reading 20 books and taking 3 MOOCs on programming not being able to tic tac toe game. It is far more difficult to envision someone who built 10 projects not being able to program.

What I dislike about the projects linked is that they give you all the code, rather than just giving you the challenge. Shameless plug: I started a blog about programming challenges (projects, not algorithms) where you just get the tests and you have to write the code. The first (and only, for now) project is a URL shortener: https://cmocanu.github.io/blog/post/url_shortener/