> but it saved me from a bunch of tedious work that I don’t enjoy anyway.

I play music and find practicing scales and learning music theory much more tedious and less enjoyable. I'd much rather be playing actual songs and having that flow where it is like the music is just coming out of me. But the reason I do the tedious stuff is because I don't get the latter stuff without the former. I can still learn to play songs without learning scales and just practice the lines. This is much more enjoyable and feels much faster. I'd even argue it is much faster if we're only measuring how fast I learn a single song. But when we talk about learning multiple songs, it is overall slower. Doing the tedious stuff helps me learn the foundation of everything. Without doing the tedious things I'd never develop the skills to sight read or learn to play a song by ear.

I don't think this is different with any other skill. I see the same effect in programming. I even see the same effect in writing a single program. I think this is totally a fine strategy for "smaller" programs because the "gap" is small. But as the complexity increases then that gap widens. Most of my time isn't spent writing lines of code, most of my time is spent planning and understanding. Complexity often comes from how a bunch of really simple things interact. The complexity of music is not the literal notes, it is how everything fits together. Personally, I'll take a bit more time to write those lines if it makes me quicker at solving the harder problem. I still write notes on pen and paper even if I never look at them afterwards because the act of writing does a lot to help make those things stick.