I worked with a lot of schools in my last company and unfortunately I don't think extensive research is the best road either. While I totally understand your position, this excuse is also used for only allowing pen and paper for math in highschool by teachers.

It takes a crazy amount of time to extensively research and prove things in education for a few reasons:

There is opposition to doing the research because teachers/parents don't want their students to be the first.

It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers.

It's expensive and mostly controlled by the big granters (ex. Gates Foundation).

Results are often looked at via testing measures (which if you look at assessments, sometimes they were proven by having 400 white kids in an affluent school use, aka not representative).

And so, we have a bit of an issue.

Almost no one teaches math via a spreadsheet even though most adults do. It isn't researched on the implications.

Data science as a class to qualify for credit to get into college is greatly contentious because it isn't proven. Even though it is clearly important to our current era.

In addition, teachers are human and so they don't necessarily teach with the 100% best proven methodologies day in and day out.

So I think it's important to realize that education is human. It's flawed and messy and isn't aligned to the best methods already. Sometimes you get lucky with a teacher that works for you and sometimes not.