I really, really don’t think so.Not that long ago the vast majority of human learning was via practice, not theorising
Tuition in one form or another, so transferring knowledge from one brain to another, is probably a defining or differentiating characteristic of us upright apes. Many, many creatures teach their offspring to some extent, but nothing like to the extent that we teach.
Much of the “initial knowledge capital” was certainly gained by trial and error, but it wasn’t down to each successive individual to discover everything over again, and a rich oral tradition is as much a library as is a pile of books, maybe even more so, because it gets foisted upon the individual. TBH Im not certain whether the “soma” in question is the individual, of the entire collection of individuals, but if it’s the former then the collected wisdom in the heads of the tribe members is “extra-somatic”.
As for theorising, humans seemto have been at that game from very early-on too, postulating by extension from proven knowledge and essaying, making the odd inductive leap etc.
You are right that technologies have long emerged in advance of any deep theoretical understanding of them, but it would also be true to say that the two have often progressed sort-of hand-in-hand, and although theory preceding practise by a long distance has become much, much more common in recent centuries it wasn’t completely absent before that.
As for the overall “ignorance was bliss” drift of what you say, I don’t buy it. People managed to exist in large numbers in miserable and degraded condition before the “knowledge revolution” (invented term) as much as they have since, they just existed in smaller numbers because of lack of the knowledge needed to sustain greater numbers.
To be sure, our ability to obliterate ourselves either in a bang or a series of whimpers, is greater than it’s ever been, but so is our ability to sustain ourselves. Everything to play for in the second half, as they say in football commentaries.