"Understanding" someone else's solution is not comparable to solving it on your own, even if you can answer some questions about it. It builds extremely fragile surface-level understanding.

That struggle and repeated failure before finally connecting the dots on your own is how you build intuition and deep understanding.

Yes, all learning takes practice, it's the core of how our brain learns things. Any tool that eliminates the practice part means suboptimal, or zero, learning. Practice isn't just for physical tasks like riding a bike. All skills take practice, meaning repeated cycles of failures over a long time horizon.