I agree making time to learn at work for a job you've had for a while is important, but we should probably make a distinction for newhires. Software has a low barrier to entry and I'm sure many of us have been victim to people who earnestly, but mistakenly, believe they are capable programmers. As a result, they're constantly "learning", in effect turning the job into a classroom, and leaving embittered peers who have to pick up the slack indefinitely. This type of "learning" can be toxic. (Of course, good hiring practices should be able to filter those sorts of people, but hiring practices can be its own can of worms.)
This is a good point: the tradeoff for learning vs doing depends on how good a learner the individual is. You're describing people who are not efficient at learning. Therefore allocating a lot of learning to them is a bad idea.
Maybe this is why programming interviews are infamous for arbitrary puzzles: the more unexpected and weird, the more the interview tests adaptability rather than current skill.
