I mean, one of the first major papers about supercapacitors from back in the late 50s, early 60s, something around that, included a line like "we don't know what's actually going on inside this component when we use it this way, but it sure does store a lot of energy, here's how to make one".

There's nothing shocking or unreasonable or even old-fashioned about understanding what something does before we wonder why it does it. In fact, I'm pretty sure the origin of almost all human knowledge has been precisely in questions of exactly that sort.