Merely listening to something without properly interrogating your understanding of it.. you will end up with a bunch of shallow and untested knowledge. At best, a boffin.
It's imperative to build, discuss, interrogate, trial and fail.
If they have to do something new they either give up or just try to come up with something on their own. Most of the time people have done things like that before and you can just read about them or look at their code.
Interspersing the two is perhaps the best way of learning. For example you don't want to learn to swim by watching 12, hour-long videos on swimming techniques, costumes and its history. You do wanna watch a 15 minute instructions video on how to get your feet wet and then go ahead and actually get your feet wet and then come back and watch the next 15 minutes of video on how to step into the pool.
Once I got into the workforce I would avoid this learning gap by creating side projects or taking extra work which was aimed at learning specific new things.
If I sat through talks or presentations I would just information dump into a text file which I would data mine later. The taking of the notes helped some with retention, but organizing it according to my own thought process helped make it more navigable later when I was stuck on something.
Works pretty well for me in my career. YMMV if you try the same thing.
I learned Indonesian more or less from reading an excellent grammar book about twenty times over years.
And then I went there, and to my shock, I was able to speak it.
The high point was when I had an argument with people in the airport about the amount of airport tax and got them to concede they'd done the exchange rate right, all in Indonesian.
I would not recommend that way of learning language to anyone, but I just love grammar books, and I had a lot of spare time those years.
But I do agree with your point. Heck, I probably would have learned faster with a workbook and exercises.
Just listening to something is completely different than being able to do something with what you just listened to.
Learning involves more than just recalling things from memory.
Why can’t you build things while setting aside time to learn from other peoples mistakes?
But then applying that insight and playing with it in various dimensions is what built an intuition.