Wrong.
Learn by doing is literally how we have evolved as a species. For the purposes of the game and its accelerated time, LBD makes a ton more sense. Yeh yeh it was broken in how it was implemented, you should never have been able to gain the knowledge of say, making concrete by spamming stone axes, however it's incredibly realistic to make better stone axes the more and more you make.
Hell you described LBD yourself when you said 'and many trials of failure before success is gained'. I like that idea. Failure chances eat the materials. Let's do it.
...finding what is essentially the same magazine over and over again in loot is "Learn by Reading", which would make sense in some contexts but not the more abstract materials you read over and over again the smarter you become on the subject. All of a sudden the world is filled with magazines? C'mon man.

They should have disintegrated faster than wood rots.
The perfect system IMO would have been LBD where it makes sense (making better quality items), LBR where it makes sense (learning new skills as a baseline for later LBD), and a Skill tree to select from on character generation (old world skills you start off with as a baseline).
Making a stone axe? Come across a "primatives" book, or try it on your own with a chance to fail rate, or start off with a skill. Making a better stone axe? Doing it over and over again. Forging a scrap or even iron axe? Find a book that teaches you basic forgery skills, then find a book that's specific to that *type* of item (not a lot of difference between forging an axe and a machete, but a far cry from forging bullets).
The good news is, we've probably got 2 more alphas left, and tfp likes to change systems entirely so... fingers crossed.
Let me summarize. LBD was the best method, it was just executed veeeery poorly, by allowing LBD to learn things not associated with the repetitive action.