I'd have a different theory about the problems of "experiential learning" in a class room setting. I've taught myself a lot on my own and so the idea of exploratory learning always appealed to me. But all the experiential learning circumstances I've been exposed to just felt like tricks. The teacher has something in mind they want the student to learn, doesn't tell them exactly what that is, and still expects them to learn to exactly that thing, rather than some other things that the circumstances presented might teach the student.
Actually, this relates to a lot of contexts. One example is those terrible job interviews where the interviewer says something vague like "tell me about yourself" but expects to learn specific thing. Another is Role Playing Games (I'm an avid player of these). There's a classic problem where a dungeon master expects their players to explore a city and make a specific discovery with the clues given. That's typically much harder than the DM imagines and experienced DMs learn to just set-up situation and let whatever the players discover be what happens.
In general, I think a teacher or authority should say what they want in a learning or examination process, if they want a specific thing. Because if they don't say that, their idea of what a person would "naturally" discover through exploration might actually be wrong, indeed given the natural variation in people's cognition, it probably is going to be wrong some large portion of the time for many students.