Everything is analog, your rise time, your standing waves, your sensors and everything has parasitics. My rule of thumb is that anytime you tell yourself you will avoid learning something in electronics you will eventually have to learn it. That said, you can get a very long way by knowing almost nothing at all beyond high school science and playing lego, and I'm not talking about arduino at all. Need an Analog Front End? Take one from a reference design, take their code while you are at it. Want to know what is messing with your circuit? Learn and understand Maxwell's equations, or put it on a scope and google about. If you want to get products manufactured there is a lot to learn but if you do normal well understood things you don't need to be brilliant or talented.

I wouldn’t say Maxwells equations are necessary to accomplish almost anything in embedded systems, or even in most of electrical engineering.

Thanks, I got the idea. So basically the deeper you go the more fundamental you have to go back, right?

I'm also considering a bottom up method that starts from (re)learning circuits from high school physics classes. Back then, IIRC we also used breadboard and I very much enjoyed the experiment part of the course.

Plus it might help the kid in the future.