There is a learning method that hasn't been mentioned in this thread. Namely, a middle ground between pure cobbling and pure theory. In addition, you have to find a method that is optimal to you.

For myself, that's a feedback loop where bugs during cobbling naturally present themselves as theory questions needing an answer, rather than practical questions needing a solution.

It is rare to find documentation of such high quality that grasping the fundamental abstraction does not require theory-attentive debugging.