One camp says grammar is the skeleton and you cannot skip it. The other says children never studied it and turned out fine. Both are arguing about the wrong thing: not whether rules help, but what they are for.
A rule is a shortcut, not a substitute
Adults have an advantage children do not: you can be told a pattern in thirty seconds instead of inferring it from two thousand examples. That is a real saving, and refusing it on principle is just slower. But knowing a rule is not the same as using it. The rule tells you what the pattern is. Only repeated production makes it automatic, and nothing shortens that part.
Learn the rule after you have met the pattern
An explanation lands much better when you have already seen the thing three or four times and noticed it is strange. Then the rule resolves a question you actually have. Read the explanation once, briefly. Do not study the table. Go back to using the language and let the rule sit behind what you are doing.
Know which rules are worth the trouble
Some rules pay immediately: basic word order, how to make a question, how to negate, the two or three tenses you need to tell a story. Learn these deliberately and early. Others are rare, heavily hedged, and full of exceptions. Those you absorb or you never need. Studying them early is how people spend a year on grammar and still cannot order a coffee.
Use rules the way you would use a map in an unfamiliar city: glance at it when you are lost, then put it away and keep walking.