It's funny how as adults we become interested in elements of stuff we were taught and found boring before. But I'm not sure how you'd teach science without "shoving it down people's throats" because most teenagers simply don't give a shit about any of it, so pretty much anything you teach will be shoving it down someone's throat. The better solution would be explaining why electron structure is important foundational stuff. About 98% of the time, in HS, they didn't explain why we needed to know it, how it would be contextualized in later life - it was simply "learn this so you can pass next week's test." And for me, knowing why is crucial to me caring enough to learn.

I hated chemistry in school, because it was teaching us irrelevant shit like the electron structure of atoms.

It's only unimportant because you don't care. Reading random facts on Wikipedia isn't learning, it's just reading. You can read the Wikipedia page on juggling, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling) but I wouldn't expect you to understand (much less, perform) a 3 ball cascade, reverse cascade and waterfall after just reading the page. Those are very basic juggling patterns and fundamentals to more advanced patterns, such as juggler's tennis, mills mess, boston mess etc... and that's the difference between learning, and reading.

Not ripping on going on a Wikipedia dive here, it's one of my favorite things to do, but recognize that it's not the same as learning