I'm on both sides of this.
Project based learning is great in that the student gets exposure to 'things' and has to figure out how to wire it all together. The down side is depth of exposure and the ability gain 'real' understanding is typically lacking.
A friend of my wife's husband is a boot camp grad, he can whip out a buzzword compliant web app, but is missing some foundational understanding of what's really happening under the covers. When his aws account started racking up charges like crazy, helping the poor guy debug what he'd built meant working back from his project based understanding of what he'd built meant filling in a lot of blanks for him so he could connect the dots.
A friend of my wife's husband is a boot camp grad, he can whip out a buzzword compliant web app, but is missing some foundational understanding of what's really happening under the covers. When his aws account started racking up charges like crazy, helping the poor guy debug what he'd built meant working back from his project based understanding of what he'd built meant filling in a lot of blanks for him so he could connect the dots.