This learning style is not universal and, in my view, why this article is specifically titled "Music theory for nerds". Programmers especially can make highly complex music without ever learning a classic instrument. Algoraves, chiptune, generative music, DAWs, real-time music programming environments etc. are all a thing and participants often don't need any concept of a "real" instrument to create quality music therein.

I think you're right about the happy/sad being a cultural quality but there might be portions of it that might be explained by other means. Here's my attempt, which is almost surely at least partly wrong: "Major" chords have more constructively interfering waves than do "Minor" chords, especially in the lower frequencies, where more of the power lays.

I would say this more as programming and math centered folks prefer subjects that are amenable to first principle analysis, which is what drew them to math and programming in the first place. And folks with that mental inclination will tend to use those tools to bear on all problems and subjects. When all you have is a hammer, etc.

But it's important to remember that not every subject is built from first principles. Not everything in the world is reducible to a simple system with emergent properties. There is no Grand Unified Theory of history, no five axioms of mammalian biology. And, while I like the mother sauces, there is no culinary theory that can logically prove which recipes will taste good.

We saw attempt to formalize in the 50s and 60s around spoken language. Chomsky and other linguists hoped to fully systematize spoken languages and analyze them according to formal grammars. Computer scientistics hoped to figure out all the rules of human languages so precisely that computers could parse them with perfect accuracy. The efforts failed. It turns out that while there are certainly patterns and grammars to how humans speak, the rules are fuzzy, ever-changing and deliberately broken.

Music theory is also particularly tempting for people who like thinking mathematically, because it does have some numbers and stuff around frequency, intervals, etc. But music is about 10% systematic and 90% arbitrary cultural history. One can certainly focus on the subset that fits in that 10% and have an enjoyable experience making music while doing so. But a whole lot of music won't "make sense" in any real way if you discount "because people did it that way and others got used to hearing it" as a valid justification for some musical practice.

There is no mathematically sound reason why we prefer the sound of a stretched out metal spring rattling against a taut piece of plastic on the second and fourth beat of every measure. Any explanation for why thousands of songs do that today has to involve discussions of goat skin, the Atlantic slave trade, the American fad for Hawaiian music in the 1930s, etc.

Also, I guess my comment does sort of imply that I meant a classical instrument but arguably some of the things you listed could also be described as instruments, in which case, my point still stands. If you want to learn western music theory with the intentions of writing music, which is what this article is describing more or less, you need to have a way to make western music, whether that be a cello, a tracker, or a gameboy it doesn't matter.

You're absolutely correct that we all learn differently but I would bet the people who learned and understood music theory well prior to learning and/or experimenting with some sort of sound generation first are in the minority. Most people will learn both at the same time. Playing music goes along way with reinforcing why things are done the way they are done and reading about the concepts after hearing them, playing them, experimenting with them goes a long way.