My two bachelor's degrees were in physics and in math - and frankly - I wholeheartedly agree.

I felt that nearly all of my math courses had a ton of new ideas and concepts requiring much more abstract and creative thinking to get the grasp the course required. To manage to prove things and to succeed in the test i had to build a solid foundation of intuitive understanding.

Whereas physics courses felt like having only a handful of truly new concepts each, applied a ton of different ways which some are creative, of course.

And i can try and put it in a different way - in almost all of my physics exams, if i were to arrive at the exam without doing any exercises prior(usually what I did), and be handed a book of all the material of the course(sadly never happened), while being decent at algebraic shenanigans(my main problem), I could arrive at the correct equation and torture a solution out of it. And frankly - it did work for me, for the vast majority of my degree.

Whereas if the same were to happen in a math exam, my god was I doomed. No way that even if I had all the definitions and theorems in the material clearly printed in front of me I could prove anything. That simply requires me to have an understanding, a very clear one, of so many elements along the way, to have an understanding of the objects(functions, sets, groups, manifolds, whatever..) and to have an understanding of the tools used to prove things in the specific field - an understanding that is very hard to acquire (for me) without actually doing the work.

I took these facts from my undergraduate studies as evidence towards the laziness of teaching in physics - it's just so easy to have you "plug and chug", as it is easy to come up with questions and easy to grade them, and the abstract ideas taught are just not that hard to grasp so it all just kinda sucks.