It's fairly easy to teach the behaviour of LR parsers (though which grammars end up being LR and which end up conflicting is very inintuitive).

It's much harder to teach the inner working / implementation of such parsers. Table generation adds an extra layer of indirection. I skip this in my class, because I doubt it will be very valuable to students to be able to implement an LR parser compared to other things we cover in the class.

Doing the OP's approach, you can get some intuition for how a LR parser behaves / is implemented without going to the full complexity.