I believe you misunderstand how the process of learning occurs. If you really want to deeply understand something, it's a whole process of connecting up existing facts and schemas in your brain. That happens more smoothly over time by processes like seeing metaphors. A good teaching metaphor always involves a description of how the metaphor fails. Learning from metaphors is not a weakness, nor is it the only plank to build a house of knowledge on. Eventually, you will need to understand the mechanics too, but there's nothing wrong with starting with metaphor, or examples, or visualizations, or interactive simulations, or any other teaching scaffold.
Also, don't gatekeep the field, unless you have a citation that proves that modern teaching techniques have really led to a decrease in quality of software engineers. I really doubt you have any concrete measure you can point to that won't be anecdotal, but if you have one I am interested in hearing why you think you can strongly believe that folks have gotten wore over time because we got better at teaching.
> Also, don't gatekeep the field, unless you have a citation that proves that modern teaching techniques have really led to a decrease in quality of software engineers.
I don't think modern teaching techniques have. I think the profession has done admirably (but not good enough) at cultivating the basics in more people than managed it ever before.
But when you multiply the size of the profession by so much, even if teaching improves greatly, odds are you're including a lot more volatility in the amount of ability/intrinsic interest/talent.
There's people who are making it today who'd never have been good enough 20-40 years ago. We need a bunch more programmers and software engineers now, so we tolerate it. And thankfully, improvements in tooling, debugging, and instrumentation, along with a bunch more available performance and storage, limit the harms.
Also, don't gatekeep the field, unless you have a citation that proves that modern teaching techniques have really led to a decrease in quality of software engineers. I really doubt you have any concrete measure you can point to that won't be anecdotal, but if you have one I am interested in hearing why you think you can strongly believe that folks have gotten wore over time because we got better at teaching.