Comment by beyarkay
(author here) I love the graduate student + nobel laureate reference, I had read that study but totally forgot how relevant it is to the essay. Absolutely it hammers home the point that there's something about just spending casual time with experts in a field that's invaluable to novices, regardless of the skill/talent of the novice.
I'm reading a book that's partly inspired by academia settings and one thing that jumped to me is the papers vs lab interactions in learning. All the things that you need to know is already in the papers, but the link between the concepts is rarely explained and that's what gives you the solution for a given problem.
The MDN is a very comprehensive documentation for all things about programming a web application. But for a given task, the subset of docs you want and the link between them is not on MDN, it's found in the experience you have in dealing with similar things. And that's what you can give junior, the recipe for all the ingredients they need for a solution.
Letting them try first is for them to get to know the ingredients and kinda the general steps. By the time you tell them the recipes, they can just focus on the precise steps and measurements.