Yes sir! That would have been my supposition too. I often thought, "Why are they letting these kids develop wrong muscle memory?" But then, as I said, some magic occurs, and suddenly the techniques look good. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm as surprised as anyone that the "Don't correct them much, but make them repeat the technique even if incorrectly a lot" teaching technique somehow seems to yield good results. To your point, I still find it mystifying that this actually works.
If you think about it, don't we learn a lot of stuff in life that way? Messing up over and over again until we work out how to get it right?
I think that there's a balance to be found - give some correction, but not too much. If a student is constantly getting corrected, they may feel like "I can't get this right, I'm never going to get this". So a little bit of correction here and there, praise what they do they correctly to reinforce that & keep them motivated ("good job pivoting your foot!", "good kihap!", etc), and let them keep trying.