Even supposedly unrecoverable washed out highlights are surprisingly recoverable on newer cameras. For sure there are exceptions (bright snow scenes for example), but it's rare I will touch the exposure comp dial today.
Exposure metering is pretty great nowadays anyway (even on modern cellphones like the Pixel/iPhone), I love how you can effectively spot meter on the iPhone just by touching anywhere on the viewfinder.
I agree that tap-for-spot-expose is nice, but insufficient if your subject should be bright or dark. E.g. taking a picture of a high- or low-key mural.
But: I also agree with you that when you want to go a step further you can use things like exposure to express your feelings even more.
It's kind of like saying, "a virtuoso can make beautiful music with an out-of-tune guitar". That's very true, but beginners should still tune their guitars.
Feelings don't matter if you can't see the subject because your point and shoot exposed for the bright background. That's frustrating and gets in the way of producing a shot you're proud of (e.g. by using the framing techniques you suggest).
I think most cameras today create great picture quality in auto mode. Lime a guitar with autotune.
But a perfectly tuned guitar can still be played bad.
So I think there are 2 simple rules that will give you a nice simple song: rule of thirds and space to look.
Take SnapChat for example. It's a great gateway into photography, because it's fun and accessible. But god forbid you ever pose a subject against a white background. You're just looking at a grey mess with a dark blob in front of it.
At least the camera app on my Motorola sprouted a compensation dial a couple years back. That made me very happy, and comfortable enough just to carry my phone around for casual photography.
To mirror your reply, a perfectly composed picture where the subject is just a black blob against a generic blue sky exposed to middle grey is still a bad picture. I'm not disagreeing with your advice; but I don't think it's either-or.
Modern sensors gave the software enormous ability to extract details and do exposure compensation on shadows and only shadows in post processing, especially if the scene is stored in RAW format. There's however nothing that the sensors can do with the washed out highlights - that information is gone and no post processing can do anything about it. So the basic rule of shooting a scene that has brights and dark elements is to always underexpose to get the bright details in as it keep the option of bringing dark details out.
Someone just getting started in the hobby is much better served by learning to turn a dial on their point-and-shoot than messing around with developing raws. Minimizing the turnaround time between shooting and results is crucial to promote development of aesthetic sense and appreciation for the hobby that is necessary to justify the investment in learning the development process.
Understand and embrace exposure compensation. If your camera doesn't give you rapid access to that control, get a new one. (Thankfully most cell phone cameras do these days.)
90% of crappy Facebook pictures could be made passable if the subjects were correctly exposed. Too often, bright or dark backgrounds are exposed as a dull grey, leaving subjects washed out or in shadow.
If the scene is bright ("high key"), nudge that knob up so it looks bright. If the scene is dark ("low key"), nudge it down so it looks dark. This can completely change the dynamics of a photograph for the better, and will allow you to more readily focus on the aesthetic aspects of photography such as composition.