My experience has mostly been that people with non-performance music degrees are very comfortable with the idea of theory as a communication tool based on certain practices & expectations that has sharp limitations when going outside of them. With some powerful exceptions of course.

From what I've seen it's mostly amateur experts and single-tradition performers that have the prescriptive "top down" view of theory. If you're actually playing a lot of different types of music with a lot of different types of musicians you just can't avoid noticing what doesn't fit into it.