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My intuition is that giving the impression that "you should defer to someone who has read more theory than you/read X amount of theory" is a belief people who read theory have is extremely counterproductive towards building this understood incentive.

The point isn't that you should blindly defer to people, the point is that when people try to teach you something, you should listen to them. This isn't to say that someone saying "well I read, so i'm smarter and XYZ" is correct, it's to say that someone saying "actually, this point you made is an incorrect understanding of Lenin - when he wrote XYZ it was in the context of ABC, meaning DEF" might be worth listening to and learning from. If someone comes in with citations and disagrees with you, you have to either prove them wrong by checking the text yourself, or accept that they might be right. There's no arguing with research using vibes, which is extremely common in general (not just leftist spaces).

A related thing: I personally often do learn things from secondary sources (summaries of theory, discussions, etc.), as do many other people, which is fine. However, I accept that I probably don't understand those concepts as well as people who have studied them more closely, and when someone corrects me on them I look up the corrections in more detail in order to fill those gaps in my knowledge/understanding.

I think this might indicate that they were shown or convinced in some way that reading was important for their survival. I think that's a little stronger of an understood incentive than anything we have in America.

Yes, of course. The point is that "I don't like reading" isn't much a barrier considering people who couldn't read managed to learn the theory.

I get that it's not the intention, but this post reads like praising one set of peoples as innately good and scolding another as innately bad.

Reading/not reading theory doesn't make someone inherently good or bad, but I would argue that refusing to read is a harmful choice.