Most advice for creating high achieving people is meant for high achieving kids of high achieving parents.
Independent study is perfect when the student has a strong base for subject navigation and requisite enterprisingness to investigate by themselves.
A beginners needs to be hand held, because they often don't know what they don't know. Keeping the cognitive load low helps keep the student from developing aversion foe the subject.
I only fully grasped this when I tried to learn drums as an adult. Training wheels and strictly guided practice is essential to reach the first level of competence. You can own your development journey after that.
Exceptions exist, and those are the geniuses. To me, a genius is someone who can demonstrate competence in a field, despite bad pedagogy. They should never be used to guide teaching methods for the other 99%.
I suggest an old book, the Carl von Clausewitz short summary of his treaty on war, where he say "even an imbecile who understand few basic rules and apply them slavishly could drive an army and being seen as a war master", that's to say that even very modest child can learn if they are taught by a Teacher, while even very smart child without a good teacher are easily frustrated and dispersed by schools.
A teacher who know, know how to communicate, how to interest his/her audience will be able to makes good students out of any kind of students, certainly not all will became luminaries, but they'll keep going anyway without frustration and finding their way in the society.
So yes, I'm advocate to teach ALL with the teaching technique that works for the most skillful students in top schools. Some will dig, in a direction or another, some others not, but all learn something, while the classic "standard school only indoctrinate mediocrity frustrating the smartest and the dumbest as well, dispersing knowledge and only forming useful idiots https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef...
Do you know of any research suggesting that would be an effective way of teaching first graders?