Like you I'd much rather read text about the psychology of musical perception and the why of music. I disliked the notation drills etc. when I had piano lessons as a kid, but as I never had a natural ear for chords or harmony (and thus frequently found myself wanting to improvise things but without a good understanding of how to go about it) I came back to the theoretical stuff as an adult, and ended up getting interested in other musical traditions like Arabic and Indian styles as well as the western one (though I don't want to oversell my knowledge or skills here). Different traditions use different schemes but they all have some way to codify things, because unless you stay within a single tradition or are blessed with an eidetic memory chances are you'll need to note things down at some point.

Where I'm disagreeing with you is on the terminologyl I hold that when people search for 'music theory' it's because they want to be conversant with other people on the basics, even if they just want the bare minimum of how to distinguish between major and minor, construct a few basic chords, or read/write a melody outside of a piano roll. It's unfortunate that the label 'music theory' has become associated with this basic stuff; it's as if we used 'literature' to refer to basic spelling, grammar, and vocabulary and used some other term to describe the actual study of artistic writing - but that's how it is.

Only in the way that the label mathematics has become associated with arithmetic. The stuff here is what you need to know in order to get started analyzing music of the common practice period (you'd need set theory to talk about the pitch content of most music after 1900). But when people get doctorates in music theory, they are not stil studying the circle of fifths. They use these concepts to describe music in order to come to some understanding of how and why it is structured.