I think of it like this:

Friction is an element of the environment like any other. There's an "ecology of friction" we should respect. Deciding friction is bad and should be eradicated is like deciding mosquitoes or spiders or wolves are bad and should be eradicated.

Sometimes friction is noise. Sometimes friction is signal. Sometimes the two can't be separated.

I learned much the same way you did. I also started a coding bootcamp, so I've thought a lot about what counts as "wasted" time.

I think of it like building a road through wilderness. The road gets you there faster, but careless construction disturbs the ecosystem. If you're building the road, you should at least understand its ecological impact.

Much of tech treats friction as an undifferentiated problem to be minimized or eliminated—rather than as part of a living system that plays an ecological role in how we learn and work.

Take Codecademy, which uses a virtual file system with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Even after mastering the lessons, many learners try the same tasks on their own computers and ask, "Why do I need to put this CSS file in that directory? What does that have to do with my hard drive?"

If they'd learned directly on their own machines, they would have picked up the hard-drive concepts along the way. Instead, they learned a simplified version that, while seemingly more efficient for "learning to code," creates its own kind of waste.

But is that to say the student "should" spend a week struggling? Could they spend a day, say, and still learn what the friction was there to teach? Yes, usually.

I tell everyone to introduce friction into their lives...especially if they have kids. Friction is good! Friction is part of the je ne sais quoi that make human's create

Heh... I wanted to say in my original comment - that friction is so good, without it we wouldn't have kids... but...