It's not that hard to imagine, or you put no effort in. Looting is fun in the game. Magazines are a part of loot. It gives the players more incentive to explore around specific locations and loot. On top of being able to loot tool stores for tools, i can also choose to loot a tool store for tool magazines. If you find magazines mind numbing then you must find looting to also be mind numbing, which is strange. Looting would be important whether magazines exist or not.
Learn by doing is actually mind numbing and boring from an objective point of view. Spam crafting is extremely monotonous and not nearly as exciting as delving into a POI. Being forced to waste a ton of time repeatedly spamming an action to level it up instead of doing something more interesting. LBD is literally the most repetitive thing yet you don't see it that way for some reason. Survival has as much importance as it's had for many years, though the water change made it slightly better for early game.
I can't understand your logic at all. Calling what's essentially caveman leveling "intuitive" is interesting. Of course anyone with a braincell can figure out such a simple and uncreative system, that doesn't mean it's intuitive or better than magazines.