That's not a great comparison. People absolutely do learn by watching, especially when they do so actively.

Your counter-examples have the property that most of the things you need to learn are absent from the media being watched, leading to an observation which is "obviously" true, but they ignore the impact of media on a journey properly incorporating other pieces of information. To compare to the mental models being discussed, you'd have to actually consider effects you're writing off as negligible, and when it comes to something like a world model which we've only learned by observation and which doesn't have a lot of additional specialized knowledge those effects might be much more impactful.

I agree with rogerrogerr, and your comparisons don’t make sense to me. Getting good at complex motions and understanding theory is far different than building a simple model of cause and effect in the real world.

Most people can’t explain the physics they see, but they can deduce enough to be able to predict the effects of physical actions most of the time.

But you do get good at driving by playing realistic driving games.

Eh, the stats don’t seem to support EVs being terribly explosion-prone either. In comparison to gas cars, maybe, but both are very safe in absolute terms. Harder to extinguish if they do catch fire, but I think if I came upon a fresh accident and there’s no immediate signs of a battery fire (airbags smoke, it’s normal), I would still leave the victim in the car seated until someone trained shows up.

Sure, be ready to get them out, and if they’re trapped and it’s going to be a while until fire shows up start working on that. But my mental model is that for any road legal car that is not currently on fire, there is a higher chance you’ll cause harm by rashly moving a victim than that a victim will be suddenly consumed by an enormous Hollywood style conflagration.