I've been thinking very similar thoughts. Without going into too much detail, a couple of observations:

When carpenters moved from mostly hand tools to mostly power tools, it didn't take away much of the need to understand the techniques of woodworking, it just made it all faster.

Reading a nonfiction book is very different than reading a book summary, even if (as is often the case), the ideas in the book could have been condensed way down. The point is that actually reading the whole book means you spend far more time engaging with the ideas, and so they become more deeply embedded in your neural network. In things like sports, this is just obvious, in that no one expects someone to become a good soccer player by just reading the rulebook, and obviously more practice is the main way you get better.