When I was in middle school, we had a really good typing/computer teacher that made us practice and practice touch typing without looking at the keyboard and only looking at the screen. That has served me well in my years in corporate work where much of my work is emails, messaging, etc. One of the more useful classes.
At that young age, learning was easy, and it made the muscle memory so that 35 years later, typing is almost second nature.

However, to learn a new keyboard layout would be very painful for me now, and not worth the frustration! I have enough frustrations with corporate processes that I don't need additional ones for a possible gain in typing speed.

Still interesting to see this method! If you learned on that from the start, it'd be painful trying to use a QWERTY keyboard.