> The fewer examples, the more likely they just pattern match.
A kid who uses a calculator and just fills in the answer to every question will see a lot more examples than a kid that learned by starting from simple concepts and understanding each step. But the kid who focused on learning concepts and saw way fewer problems will obviously have a better understanding here.
So no, you are clearly wrong here, humans doesn't learn that way at all. These models learn that way, you are right on that, but humans don't.