Pre-internet/stackoverflow, pre-AI... I'd easily spend 3 days working out how to solve a problem that I hadn't seen before. Asking others generally didn't help anyway because they hadn't seen it either. So, if that was the formative experience of the senior person, I could understand where that attiude was coming from.

Today, yeah 3 days is a long time to spend researching and spinning your wheels. But it's still the best way to learn.