I just think for some, bottoms up learning has quite some disadvantages and was an approach that I've used for a long time with okay results. It would get me to where I wanted to be...but it takes way too long sometimes.
Of course there are people like you mentioned though who only do top down learning but just never go into learning the fundamentals ever, which is another problem in its own right.
* Isolate highly specific techniques into drills.
* Then go directly to practicing live gameplay. Ignore intermediate exercises.
And the approach with programming can, in fact, do this, if presented properly: definitely, we know how to isolate things into short follow-along examples. What tends to be missing is the "live gameplay" element, because it's hard to set up sample projects that are complex enough to reveal the need for a particular technique.