The goal of ab initio flight training should not be "get a PPL", it should be "become a safe pilot". This sounds rather obvious but I would suggest that too often the point is lost. I see a lot of flight training that is completely designed to pass the flight test. This is accomplished with a lot of canned lesson plans. For example the forced approach is taught at a few "favorite fields" and instead of learning flight path judgment the students learns if they turn final over the red house they will get a good mark on their fligth test.
While structure in flight training is important, it is also important that the student understands the why as well as the what and to be able to truly "see" what is happening to the airplane. Teaching aerobatics is a great example. At first the maneuvers are flown in a very cook book fashion, i.e. three parts aileron, one part rudder, half a part elevator, stir = aileron roll. But at about the 5 hour mark suddenly they can see what is happening and the controls start to be adjusted in real time. But it takes practice and repetition to develop the ability to see the maneuver. This applies as much to the very first lesson, attitudes and movement, as it does to the most advanced maneuvers,
That is IMO the problem with these intensive training. Rushing through the training does not in my experience allow flight lessons to gel.
That being said there is the opposite problem. Not flying enough means that forgotten skills needs to be retaught. The sweet spot is individually dependent but when I was teaching a lot of . PPL's. I discouraged more than one lesson a day. I wanted the student to arrive at the lesson having reviewed the previous lesson and read up on todays days lesson, and when they finished the lesson to go home and review what they did and write down any issues while they were fresh in their minds
Full disclosure I have a reputation as a very demanding instructor. Students who wanted me to spoon feed them the information and only wanted to achieve the minimum standard did not like me very much and usually quickly found a new instructor.
Finally Richard Bach is one of my favorite aviation authors. His short story collection " A Gift of Wings" has a story called " School for Perfection" . I first read the book as a young man and remember thinking about how great it would have been to be the Mister Terrell, the young student featured in the story.