To me the interesting part is you can buy brick buckets and still allow unexperienced kids to build something cool following instructions.
They’ll still do modifications and evolutions from there, the important part being that they know how it was built and can break it and rebuild again.
He gets new kits and starts by following the instructions. He learns techniques along the way. How to interlock to make things that are strong and won’t fall apart. Patterns for building subassemblies like body panels or spoilers.
As soon as he’s done following the instructions he takes the whole thing apart, and starts building his own creation with the pieces, applying the concepts he learned.
It’s kind of like music. You don’t learn to play piano by composing songs, you start by playing other people’s music to learn the fundamentals. Then you can start riffing on it.
There’s also kids who need a bit of push at the start, and/or will go through a full build following the directives to see what they want to change, or how they’d build it better.
TBH I fall in the latter category, and take that approach for a lot of things. I.e. I’ll follow a coffee brewing recipe to the letter to see what it gives, and infinitely iterate from there, including taking completely different approaches to compare.