There are quite a few legitimate entry points. There's a huge body of artists who had no idea about the physiology of human vision but absolutely understood hue, chroma, brightness.
They clearly understood the real world was HDR even if they didn't use that term. They understood the massive loss of dynamic range of their artwork, and yet they developed the concept of rendering in order to compress shadow and highlight detail to preserve some sense of the real world when important and to clip it when it wasn't important. And you don't even have to go back 600 years for such examples, even today's amateur photographer learns about these problems and work arounds, without the benefit of learning any physiology.
We can't all dedicate the time to read Wyszecki and Stiles as the entry point into color and imaging, albeit of course it's quite useful for those who need to understand such origin stories and the math for all of it.
Yes, you can develop a good intuitive understanding if you spend 15 years or whatever painting full time (the first several years mostly bumbling around under various misconceptions making lots of mistakes) as an alternative to reading a few pages about how the eye works, if you prefer.
In painting (or, say, in developing dye transfer prints in a darkroom) having a deep understanding of the output medium is essential to do any kind of passable work, because color mixtures need to be made quite explicitly by the artist. The artist can’t just pluck a 10 YR 8/10 chip out of their Munsell Book of Color and immediately transfer the color to their canvas. Instead they have to squeeze some particular paints out of tubes and smear them together with a brush.
But even so, it is very helpful for painters, graphic designers, photographers, darkroom photo printers, etc. to learn a bit about how color vision and optics work. It will help organize and clarify their intuition, help them have comprehensible conversations with other artists or laypeople, help them transfer skills between media, and so on.
It’s deeply unfortunate that new computer artists are subjected to RGB values just because highly experienced painters can learn to work with a similar system. More perceptually relevant models are much nicer to work with in user interfaces.
They clearly understood the real world was HDR even if they didn't use that term. They understood the massive loss of dynamic range of their artwork, and yet they developed the concept of rendering in order to compress shadow and highlight detail to preserve some sense of the real world when important and to clip it when it wasn't important. And you don't even have to go back 600 years for such examples, even today's amateur photographer learns about these problems and work arounds, without the benefit of learning any physiology.
We can't all dedicate the time to read Wyszecki and Stiles as the entry point into color and imaging, albeit of course it's quite useful for those who need to understand such origin stories and the math for all of it.