Well, one of the potential pitfalls with practical skills only is that you end up with a lot of skill-based workers without a strong understanding of what it is

Well, one of the potential pitfalls with practical skills only is that you end up with a lot of skill-based workers without a strong understanding of what it is they're actually doing. Most Tech stuff is a healthy mixture of theory and practical skills, often changing on a day to day basis for any given tech job. Dealing with clients who have little theoretical knowledge about the infrastructure they're maintaining is incredibly difficult as they just don't have the background to understand why there are performance issues, or why an error happens, and so on, simply because they weren't really trained to understand it, they were trained "You click this to do X, this to do Y". I am not suggesting everyone needs to be an expert in everything, but a lot of modern IT infrastructure teeters on the precipice of a complete disaster; they're the IT equivalent of "Knows enough to to damage" type users in an end-user setting, and the software is specifically set up to accommodate such users. This isn't necessarily bad; easy to use software for running mission critical software is great for everyone, but there are a lot of skills where you really need to know more than "Click this to do X" to be successful and tenable. As an aside regarding your comment on leadership focus, people can handle multiple problems at once. It's a bit strange to write off someone else's problem as silliness just because it doesn't directly affect you.