That reminds me of reading about the development of artillery targeting formulas. As one might expect, they started with the simple parabolas suggested by classical mechanics, but those turned out to be incredibly inaccurate, because none of the simplifying assumptions hold. Then, they tried to add in the frictions and other factors, but that became too complicated. Ultimately, they solved it through massive trial and error, where they explored how dozens (maybe hundreds) of variables affected the shell's trajectory.

Even when all the relevant theory is precisely developed, there can still be value in doing atheoretical empirical work.

To tie it back to the original prompt, though, were all those artillery specialists "doing physics"? I think it's reasonable to say they weren't.