Breaking things is arguably the best way to learn
Hee hee, some may agree with you. jumped into Gentoo very early and hasn’t stopped breaking things yet. Sometimes for fun, sometimes 'cause some distro maintainer type did something horrible .
I definitely support “Just try things, see what breaks, then learn to fix it” as a learning method. Not necessarily for everycritter and not necessarily as a sole learning method but certainly it can be many fun and very productive, sometimes in ways that other methods would not be.
Hey now…!
Just kidding ;P Real monarchs can piss off.