I am absolutely paid by the hour to learn stuff. The things I'm learning are mostly messy business domain bits: how does our internal API work, who wrote it, what were the constraints, which customer requested this feature, how much SLA will we lose if we break it to hotfix this CVE...

Yes the end result is at some small moment in time a thing that was built. But the value prop of the company isn't the software, it's the ability to solve business problems. The software is a means to that end. Understanding the problems is almost the entire job.

> But the value prop of the company isn't the software, it's the ability to solve business problems.

Clearly it's critical to the job, but to take your point to its limits: imagine the business has a problem to solve and you say "I have learned how to solve it but I won't solve it nor help anyone with it." Your employer would not celebrate this, because they don't pay you for the private inner workings of your own mind, they pay you for the effects your mind has on their product. Learning is a means to an end here, not the end itself.