It's a little different from the abstractions, which are of course, poor but that's less important. There are two Mims camps as a rule. Those who bought the books and perhaps read them and didn't build anything and have fond memories. Then there were those of us who actually build stuff out of the books and experienced the hell that is debugging a poor design with no skills or knowledge. My entire early days of electronics were unfortunately constrained by these books. The only reason the books existed was they looked cheap, cute and simple enough for Radio Shack to sell lots of copies and use that to leverage a hobby industry. They were not quality material and in fact were quite frustrating and destructive. Throw on the dubious quality of some of the components on the market back then (fuck you Radio Shack MPF102) and it was a mess.
Regarding The Art of Electronics, I was given the first edition of this back in the late 1980s and jumped right in. Whilst light on theory intentionally, the book is actually backed up by a lot of professional experience in the industry. There is a student guide/laboratory manual that goes with it that deals with the applied side of it as well so at a basic level they should be considered together. This book turned everything around and led to an EE career.
Roll on a few years from there, I had managed to self teach away most of the nasty, learned algebra at school, jumped into theoretical side via Sedra/Smith. After that everything worked every time. I have a box of 35 year old failures somewhere I will analyse at some point. I did consider opening a YT channel for this but time does not currently allow.