...As opposed to what?

As opposed to the historical focus of some other disciplines, mainly in the humanities, where knowing a lot about the history of the discipline is an important part of working in it.

afaik most people beyond history students taking super-focused classes learn the most about the history of science/scientists from science classes.

History yes, but also disciplines like philosophy and theology will often make room for it. That's especially true the higher you go in your study (onto graduate school), whereas that's not so much the case in the sciences themselves.

Keep in mind, too, that whether or not most students learn most about the history of science from their science classes does not itself have any bearing on whether the history of science covered in science classes is particularly good.

Off the top of my head I can name Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, Luigi Galvani, Charles Volta, Hodgkin and Huxley, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Carl Gauss

How deeply did you actually read primary texts by those figures? How much time did you spend contextualizing those texts to see where they might have been intersecting with other parts of their contemporary culture (e.g., reading Darwin alongside political economists to see where he might have been influenced by economic models)? This is the sort of stuff that you very well may do when you study science in a true liberal arts program, but it's not generally part of science training for those looking to become scientists.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, because as I said, to be a practicing scientist, one doesn't have to do any of that. Spending too much time studying the history of science would make it take much longer to actually learn how to do science, which is the goal of science programs. But my point is that you can be a practicing scientist, and even a fairly good one, without knowing to much about the history of science, just like one can be an amazing cook without knowing much about culinary history. In other words, a person can "fucking love science"--at least the actual content of scientific knowledge, and even the practice of doing science--without having much knowledge of its past.