I'm not surprised that you are confused, the territory seems to be designed with that in mind. For a start, as I think I said to you earlier, practice based learning has been around forever but it was always preceded by 2 or 3 years of highly intensive instruction in the medical sciences. It may be worth examining why this is no longer the case. Many (most?) educationalists are unhinged, most conspicuously at the top of the "profession" where there is a belief that we have gone too far down the route of literacy and numeracy. By this reckoning, formal high stakes examinations are a mistake because conventional academic attainment signals wealth and not potential, leading to lack of diversity and an unjust degree of societal inequality.
Medicine has been ahead of this curve. It is a pretty universal belief now that doctors should resemble their patients (although how this is achieved in practice, in the context of a post-take ward round or theatre list is never discussed). The UCAT was originally designed to differentiate between straight A applicants, but with diversity and equality in mind, the idea that it might replace academic attainment was too irresistible. Medicine has also done pioneering work in moving away from the didactic lecture format towards "self-directed learning" (GMC Tomorrow's Doctors, 1993), which some educationalists now see as the way forward for secondary schools (along with e-portfolios!). (Traditionally, self-directed learning is what medical students do in the evening after spending all day having had their heads stuffed with facts by specialists in their fields.)
All of this has gone down very well with medical students, who find learning the basic sciences difficult. It's good for student satisfaction scores, it's good for self-confidence (look at how often confidence is promoted as a selling point by PBL schools). Having spent four or five years dressing up as doctors and talking to patients they are sufficiently positive about their abilities to refer to themselves expert clinicians. But it's very bad for every metric of performance.
If you are a high achiever do you need to avoid it, and if so, how? Yes you do, because the curriculum, whatever it consists of, is certainly not going to be delivered at the pace of the most able. Secondly, PBL schools are set up to produce GPs (and do that badly), but medicine is a broad church and most medical specialities - although admittedly not most specialists - have minimal or no patient contact and require instead a particularly solid grounding in science, and these specialities tend to attract academic high achievers.
As to the how, there is a grey area occupied by Russell Group universities that have reduced their didactic science content in favour of early patient contact, but in most cases it is pretty obvious. Take Sunderland for example, since that has been mentioned on this thread. Look at the faculty and you find anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology, microbiology, and pharmacology taught by a total of a dozen people, who, with a few exceptions, have minute peer-reviewed research profiles in unrelated fields, or none. One of them refers to the "excretion of food", for heaven's sake. The best that can be said is that at least every basic science has a figurehead, which is not always the case in PBL medical schools.
In your position, I would read the papers that I previously cited, look at the GMC's more up to date data on postgraduate outcomes that unusually names specific medical schools, particularly shortlist courses that include a research-based year, and delve into the faculties of recently created medical schools - if you must. For an overview of the workforce there are the GMC's annual reviews, 2024 is particularly useful. Medicine is a long haul, and the training is too short, there is absolutely no benefit to the student from rushing headlong into contact with patients.