It seems to me he contradicts his own thesis here: "The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill. For example, if you want to learn a language, you need to learn a lot of words. Any method that tries to skip over the fact that there are tens of thousands of words to learn is doomed to failure. All skills are like this, it’s simply that the “atoms” of learning are usually less obvious than in languages."

...but we don't learn our first language, or any other, by first learning a few thousand words and only then speaking. We start using the very first words we learn, in real life situations, and add words as we need them. It's the real-world applicability and project-based method that he pronounces skepticism of elsewhere in the same piece.

Every coach of every sports team ever, knows that you need drills, but you also need to play actual games, to keep kids motivated to do those drills.