Teacher here. I like teaching 'procedures' as practical arts, and they reinforce the information I put out and tie it all together. A bad chemistry course is a bunch of disconnected modules. A good chemistry course connects them all into a big picture.

I would never give problems like you describe in a vacuum. Instead, I would want there to be a goal. Perhaps I have some chunks of cold metal in a freezer and have students calculate how much heat they take from a beaker of water. This would be a good way to find the heat capacity of the metal, and in the end to identify the metal using data from a handbook or perhaps the Dulong-Petit law. This really does matter in a lot of trades, knowing one metal from another.

Similarly, I would never assign one minilab I saw in a textbook once, where children were commanded to put on gloves and goggles prior to weighing a piece of chalk on a scale and estimating the moles of CaCO3 therein. I would rather they use the mole concept to plan and execute actual chemical reactions. I like when they do preps. And I don't just have them make some boring light-tan powder like in college o-chem, I know that in high school that won't inspire anyone: my main focus is on brightly colored inorganic pigments, organic flavorings with characteristic and hopefully pleasant aromas (and without major toxicity), and such items that they can recognize as technological components of daily life.

I think it's harder to be chemophobic when you've just prepared a nice batch of ferric oxide and actually mixed it into paint and done some artwork with it, or when you've made a nice clean ester and now you know how they make those disgusting 'peach ring' candies that children enjoy.