I think, its a misunderstanding to say, that either you learn GTO, or you dont. If you study any kind of poker theory like for instance preflop charts, that will almost certainly move you closer to the GTO style than a player, who have studied nothing at all. Moreover exploitative poker means adjusting to either individual opponents or player pool tendencies.
And how are you actually going to do that, if you dont know, what you are adjusting from? Then you just end up in a situation, where your thought proces is something like "I raised AJo and got 3-bet, I think, this is probably a call, questionmark." Which is not actually exploitative poker but just unstudied poker. So the question should be more like, how and what should I study first, and should I for instance invest in a solver?
And I think, that if you are new to the game, you can get far without investing in a solver. But there is no reason to not take advantage of free daily simulations or free training videos showing some of the outputs from solvers. It can help to give a much better understanding of things like, why something might be an underbluffed spot, where its ok to overfold against the population, if we dont have a specific player read.