Theoretical rigor holds any place in industrial RL research?

I have been going through GRPO and PPO today, and from what I understood is that the success heavily depeneded on the implementaiton details and the engineering quirks rather than the algorithm’s theoretical ground.

As such I want to ask a question on how the industrial research in RL proceeds, is it majorly empirical results focused, or a flexible technique with decent theoretical rigor and engineering optimization?