It is true that this is how we tend to discuss these things, but the important thing in practical circuits (even semiconductor circuits) is how they behave, not

It is true that this is how we tend to discuss these things, but the important thing in practical circuits (even semiconductor circuits) is how they behave, not why they behave that way. Really there has been only limited success in discovering new semiconducting technologies motivated from first principles -- it's mostly intuition and dabbling and experimentation that has yielded the advancements. To some degree of course motivated by models of behavior, but it's very easy to ignore all the blind alleys that theory has led down. Mostly you're better off understanding that semiconductors work by "magic" and knowing what the response curves look like (or building mental approximations and heuristics) and otherwise just treating things in terms of currents and voltages (and fields at the lower level as necessary).