Yes, it should absolutely be up to the individual to decide whether they've met the legal requirements for their job. I hope my surgeons self-certify that they're ready to operate, and the technician that repairs the airline I'm flying on should have the last word on whether he's qualified to start tinkering with the ailerons!
There are a few tasks/requirements at issue here, 1) the legal requirement that the individuals be sufficiently trained, which then requires 2) the legal requirement that training be provided. If the individual in (1) is "phoning it in" by avoiding watching the provided video, it could also be that the individuals who are providing the training are "phoning it in" by considering a video to be sufficiently fulfilling the requirement for providing training.
As is the case with a lot of these kinds of things, one ends up without any value after taking the training compared to where they were before taking the training. If this is the case, the training is meaningless. The only way to asses the value of the training is through some kind of testing as part of or after the training occurs. This is like requiring attendance of driving school for traffic violations. It is very rarely the case that anyone in driving school actually didn't know the law, but rather they were skirting it and ended up getting caught. They are only in driving school to satisfy the requirements of getting the limits on their driving lifted (being licensed or being able to get cheaper insurance). The driving school ends up being a burden because it takes time, and doesn't necessarily end up making anyone a better driver (although, you could use the lack of further infractions as the metric that the training was successful, but there's a lot of other influences here).
If both the trainer and the trainee are phoning it in, does it matter? If the trainer is phoning it in, is the trainee really doing anything worse by also phoning it in? If the trainer fails at their job because they are providing pomp and circumstance, we end up at the same place we were without doing any training at all, even if the trainees do make a concerted effort to be trained. That is, the trainee could bust their butt watching this video, but in the end, no one has actually been trained.
This isn't meant to get the trainees off the hook for phoning it in, but let's call a rose an rose and acknowledge that there might not actually be much value in 52 hours of video watching.
The spirit behind the hatred of the "you must stare at this screen for 52 hours" type requirements isn't that anyone should be able to do anything they want, but that it's a stupid requirement. Acknowledging the existence of a stupid requirement doesn't at all require thinking that all requirements are stupid.
That said, I'd never want to do business with a company that thought it could choose to ignore certain requirements, and deceive regulators about their fulfillment of them, even if they're stupid requirements.
There is a requirement that someone spend 52 hours in a pre-licensing course. There is a separate requirement that someone pass a broker exam.
If it is possible for someone to do the latter without the former, what purpose does forcing them to do the former serve? Some people will need 100 hours of preparation for the exam and some will need 10. Forcing the latter group to spend an additional 42 hours in prep simply wastes their time.
The exam tries to ensure that you know enough to be competent. The required hours are there to discourage people from trying to pass the test without actually internalizing the information. Sure, you could try to just make the test arbitrarily harder, but that's not always possible, and even if it is possible, it's unfair to the people who are capable of learning the required material, but not the material needed to pass the harder test.
Also, as has been mentioned, it's partially a liability issue for the state and the company if/when they get sued.
Part of their defense can't be that "Oh, well the state licensing exam is super easy, so I only spent an hour cramming the material before the test and then immediately forgot everything, so really you should be going after the state and not me." The required hours
If, after 8 years of med school, your surgeon had to sit through a 2 hour video made 15 years ago about "The importance of surgery" and "where to keep the scalpels", he's probably be a bit frustrated.
You've pretty much described what happens when a surgeon joins a hospital. Well perhaps that is an exaggeration, but my wife sat through several required classes on basic procedures before starting her surgery job. Hospitals, like any dysfunctional bureaucracy driven partially by lawyers, thrive on this stuff.
The situation isn't really the same; these are valley sales-types making decisions about how to provide medical insurance to thousands, and it's likely that they haven't had any formal training on what (and what not) to do.
