That said, I think you're still leaning things building IKEA-style software. The first time I learned how to program, I learned from a book and I tried things out by copying listings from the book by hand into files on my computer and executing them. Essentially, it was programming-by-IKEA-manual, but it was valuable because I was trying things out with my own hands, even if I didn't fully understand every time why I needed the code I'd been told to write.
From there I graduated to fiddling with those examples and making changes to make it do what I wanted, not what the book said. And over time I figured out how to write entirely new things, and so on and so forth. But the first step required following very simple instructions.
The analogy isn't perfect, because my goal with IKEA furniture is usually not to learn how to build furniture, but to get a finished product. So I learn a little bit about using tools, but not a huge amount. Whereas when typing in that code as a kid, my goal was learning, and the finished product was basically useless outside of that.
The author's example there feels like a bit of both worlds. The task requires more independent thought than an IKEA manual, so they need to learn and understand more. But the end goal is still practical.
But the nice thing about a cupboard and its components is that they are real objects, so the remembrance is done with the whole body (like the feeling of a screw not correctly inserted). Software development is 90% a mental activity.