There’s a lot of ground between “imitate” and “understand the subject from its first assumptions”. Arguably, the former is how all learning happens at first. We imitate to get a taste for it and start enjoying it (humans are mirrors), then we can dig deeper if we become sufficiently interested. You can hardly become truly interested in music if you are presented with all the music theory up front and don’t get to have fun playing the instrument; same with math.

Even if someone never becomes sufficiently interested to dig deeper into some academic subject and sticks to imitating, I wouldn’t say they are somehow worse and have no awareness. They may have other interests and joys in life, there’s many fulfilling things outside academia. Why would you expect everybody to be like you?