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My own experience has been that:

* You can definitely learn a lot by only listening/reading, never speaking
* You will still gain some ability to speak/write even though you never practice it
* It will be more difficult to produce if you only practice receiving, and if it's important to produce *well*, then you will definitely have to practice production

It seems logical that practicing more aspects of a language rather than focusing on an unrealistic subset would make you learn faster. Also, there are more opportunities to practice if you don't just restrict yourself to those that don't require any output. So "obviously" it's better for your learning to practice both production and reception.

The problem is that humans are not robots and it's hard to just will yourself into a habit. And language acquisition (and retention) always takes time, so you have to build some sort of routine that affords you regular practice. So it's not purely a problem of learning efficiency, but also of attrition. For example, with a very efficient method of learning (eg. rote memorization of declension tables) you may still not do well because you get too bored to actually go through with it properly.

With "output", it can be daunting to try and speak with many mistakes. Some people don't mind, others get discouraged that they're speaking a broken version of the language. For the second kind, it's sometimes easier to focus on input, until they acquire enough vocab and grammar to feel "well-equipped" to produce. It's not that it's more efficient, it's more that it still works and it's more palatable to them as a learning strategy.

If you are focusing on input, you are probably reading or watching/listening to scripted material. This can create some odd habits, since natural speech is usually less structured. You may end up coming across as somewhat unnatural (because you are using too many full sentences) and slow (because you have to keep pausing to compose a full sentence). A lot of organic speech involves skills to manage pace - filler words when you need to buy some extra time to think, reiterating past points because there's no "glancing at the previous page" anymore, certain types of open ended syntax that let you begin a sentence, and decide halfway through how you will end it. When you don't practice output, these are the skills you're missing out on. But presumably, at some point you *would* feel confident enough to start producing more - once you do, it seems easy to "catch up" on these.