The counterpoint is that if you learn things by seeing how they are done, it teaches you even less of why they are done the way they are.
One thing that, I think, would make getting some of these things easier from how I imagine your POV, is to imagine you have 10x more instances of the thing than you do. This makes it clearer why e.g. making as large as possible part of your system stateless and worrying less about trying to recover it from blunders (instead just making it very easy to reinstall/recreate it from scratch) is something that people often strive for.