Software Engineering is a profession that deeply revolves around saving people time.

The tiniest fraction of software engineering involves goals other than "saving humans minutes."

The foundational knowledge of software engineering, mathematics, linking real world problems to discrete mathematical foundations. Projection of subsets, grouping abstractions, logarithmic graphs.

It's valuable, because it saves time.

Almost the entirety of mathematics was discarded to identify that foundational knowledge.

Keep in mind, human life will always involve juggling multiple different worries at once, & compromising.

It's never a "do this, or do that" situation.

My pet peve is people complaining about that. That you seem to think that's an issue shows how long it's been since the last time you really ventured out of your current comfort zone/domain knowledge.

Trying to "understand" first means that you're just reading things for weeks or months if you barely know anything about a technology, domain and everything around it. That's a time period in which this less experienced person can gradually learn how the system, technology and domain works and they'll eventually graduate to prefer understanding over answers. Do keep in mind that these beginners can't distinguish between irrelevant and meaningful information, so they'd have to go through decades of documentation before they're able to "understand".

Just give them a break and tell them the answer. After a while, (which you'll likely feel to be much too long) they'll grow a bigger knowledge base and will be able to meaningfully understand problems.