Shuzan held out his short staff and said: "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"
I think the dichotomy you are proposing is one of many paradoxes where it just depends. Yes, if you break your wrists trying to bench press too much, you’re doing it wrong. If you try to bench press just under too much, you will achieve maximal strength gains overt time. You will also be very sore and experience some joint pain.
Absolutely agree we live in a culture of almost performative pain and sacrifice. Like the whole “rise n grind” scene, etc.
I prefer to think of growth and achievement as best done by “working smart” rather than “working hard”. I think it’s what you are saying essentially but in my conception of “working smart”, there definitely is room for strategic pain and in some cases the optimal approach is take on as absolutely much pain as you can stand (up to perhaps “injuring” yourself) to even have a chance of achieving the cases’s goal. Think of [practically] one-off concerns like taking the LSAT or qualifying for the Olympics before you are too old.
Another way to frame this is you need something beyond brute force systematic hypothesis generation, something that calls on informed intuition and non-rational ways of knowing. Unfortunately, it seems it’s not a problem of just raising awareness that people should do science better, it’s a more fundamental problem of population-level adult development levels needing to be raised more generally. For example, see Chapman’s https://metarationality.com/ or even just https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge .