Ergo I'm glad I steered around them. My favourite author on such matters is Wes Hayward, particularly Experimental Methods in RF Design which taught me more about electronics than any other book out there.
I think there might be two kinds of electronics enthusiasts: the hobbyist and the EE major. For those like myself where electronics is a hobby, Forrest was something of a hero.
I have heard that (rightfully!) said about "Art of Electronics" but this is the first time I have seen Mims mentioned similarly.
The biggest problem I have with everybody is being taught "electrons are flowing". I understand that teachers don't want to go down the rabbit hole of "waves are transmitting the power" but it would sure help if teachers would at least mention that electrons flowing is a "good enough" analogy and not physical reality.
Basically, just an elitist attitude that the proper way to learn about electronics is to start with the math, and anything else wasn't proper engineering. Which is sad, b/c from what I remember Forrest Mims' books are actually some of the best intro electronics info available, since he doesn't gloss over the complexity but still writes in a way that doesn't require 2 semesters of calculus to understand.
I have a very different, and more pleasant, memory of walking into a 3rd-year Electromagnetic Fields class that had some stuff on the board leftover from a senior-year "Microwaves and Radar" class. Prof said, "half a point on the midterm to anyone who knows what that diagram is." I glanced up, said, "Smith chart" and went back to getting my assignment out. He stared at me in surprise and said "Oh, we have a ham in the room!"
Don't remember if I ever got my 0.5 point increase though. I do remember barely passing that class!
It's a little different from the abstractions, which are of course, poor but that's less important. There are two Mims camps as a rule. Those who bought the books and perhaps read them and didn't build anything and have fond memories. Then there were those of us who actually build stuff out of the books and experienced the hell that is debugging a poor design with no skills or knowledge. My entire early days of electronics were unfortunately constrained by these books. The only reason the books existed was they looked cheap, cute and simple enough for Radio Shack to sell lots of copies and use that to leverage a hobby industry. They were not quality material and in fact were quite frustrating and destructive. Throw on the dubious quality of some of the components on the market back then (fuck you Radio Shack MPF102) and it was a mess.
Regarding The Art of Electronics, I was given the first edition of this back in the late 1980s and jumped right in. Whilst light on theory intentionally, the book is actually backed up by a lot of professional experience in the industry. There is a student guide/laboratory manual that goes with it that deals with the applied side of it as well so at a basic level they should be considered together. This book turned everything around and led to an EE career.
Roll on a few years from there, I had managed to self teach away most of the nasty, learned algebra at school, jumped into theoretical side via Sedra/Smith. After that everything worked every time. I have a box of 35 year old failures somewhere I will analyse at some point. I did consider opening a YT channel for this but time does not currently allow.
I found that "The Art of Electronics" includes a lot of very suboptimal circuits that easily mislead people. There are a lot of "restricted domain" circuits in AoE and very little guidance saying "If you're using this, you probably screwed up."
By contrast, I learned and built stuff from the Mims circuits all through high-school. Things worked fine for me. Now, I didn't try to do RF circuits--I was mostly doing lower speed analog with some digital stuff. I don't remember any of it being flaky. In fact, I remember using one of my Mims handbooks to help debug one of my AoE circuits.
I hit "The Art of Electronics" in college via my Physics department starting freshman year (I was a mainline EE taking a bunch of Physics classes--don't ask). Putting together experiments using circuits from "The Art of Electronics" was generally a lot of frustration.
Of course, like you, once I hit the real "Electronics 101" (a Junior year class), those problems all went away. Suddenly I knew which ones would work for which domains and my frustration mostly went away.
At the high school level it's common to teach electronics by analogy it's not exclusive to Mims.