Unless you’re working on something that has the potential to be directly influenced by a paper, I’ve found trying to stumble through academic papers to be a huge waste of time. Remember that academic papers are by and large written for other academics, not for general purpose or even specialized engineers (obviously it depends how specialized you are). Take something like merge sort - I’d recommend the Khan academy video before recommending the academic paper if you want to understand how it works. I get that you should understand “why” it works from an academic perspective, but I don’t know that you really get much value from that level of understanding.