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You can practice anything at full speed thousands of times and have trouble with thinking while you're doing it. When you slow down the practice and allow yourself to have all the thoughts while doing it you eventually get to a point where even in slow motion you're not thinking so much. When you turn back to speeding it up you can focus more on the external because you're no longer internally focused anymore. By slowing down to adjust and focus on changes you can actually implement them quicker. It's easier to feel what's wrong with a movement in slow motion too which is past even thinking about it.
I'm not sure where I exactly picked up the understanding of it, but I've used it in many different things. Taught myself to throw darts underhand like that and later realized the motion is not much different if I moved my arm behind my back. I can boast to ending 2 different games by hitting a double bullseye behind my back and slow motion practice is what got me to that point of understanding the movement while repeating it consistently. The motion is kind of the same as a granny shot but with one hand. I'd put a 2 gram dart on my middle finger with the flight around the tip pad and the tip of the dart pointing towards my hand. Swinging somewhat like rolling a bowling ball but with my fingers and palm making an "L"shape until the point of release which was stopping my arm while straightening my hand. Straightening my hand put rotation on the dart so that it flipped over to hit the board tip first. It doesn't miss much to the left or right because the entire motion is on that center line. The aim was more an up and down practice of fine tuning to get it down. I'd sometimes do overhand for specific numbers that were more horizontal but underhand has more hitting by missing on vertical numbers. That's what I equate slow motion practice from my experience most because it helped me figure out how to do it and I have always practiced it slow motion in between my turns.
I can see reason that it would help Smoak, though it certainly doesn't fix everything. I did read about him looking for certain pitches and locations the last month+ while reading up on opposing pitching as well, 2 things he claimed were fairly new for him. Sounds like he's doing everything he can to figure it out, so it's not even just slow mo practice of his swing. I'm hopeful at least and would not be surprised by progress.