This is wise advice.
This is true to some extent, but it’s also advice based on your own personality and skills. I know something about you from what you describe and the way you “talk” (write).
If the entire “population” of HO was crowded into a room, and I brought in a strange random gadget (not for cooking and not boat related) and passed it around, I would bet big money that you would be in the top ten of figuring out what it was for and demonstrating how to use it. In fact, I’d bet fairly big money that you’d be somewhere in the top one. 
You are really good at “seeing” a thing, and really good at “seeing” its context, even to the point of sort of reverse-engineering a context for it if you’re not sure. If I worked for you, it might not end well. 
I don’t “see”. (The “mind’s eye” function is actually deficient in my brain.) I’m pretty good at interpreting long complicated explanations, but many people who are good at a complex physical skill have a hard time explaining it, or dislike explanations (because explanations are indirect and error prone, or they take forever, or whatever).
My point is that there really is some non-obvious non-self-evident information required in order to be good with a knife. I believe that what you yourself do for a new knife-task is (A) mentally generate an image of how to do it, (B) try it like that, and (C) refine the image. For a complex task, you probably run mental simulations of step B first, maybe revising the image as you go, until you feel like you’ve got a pretty good idea of it.
I do the same thing, except the image I generate in step A looks like a three-year-old drew it, and it doesn’t persist in my memory. I mean, it doesn’t persist even long enough to get past step B, so I have nothing to revise. I don’t seem obviously disabled when you look at me, but I act like a man whose arms were just bolted on this morning and he isn’t quite used to them yet.
My “muscle memory” is OK, but I need different ways of getting to the point where I can HAVE muscle memory. Doing it completely wrong a hundred times doesn’t count as practice.* The old saying has it backwards; we should really tell each other “perfect makes practice”, because only after a person “gets it” is their practicing worthwhile.
* You yourself wouldn’t repeat the wrong way a hundred times, you would revise or replace your image of the process instead. But because I can’t “see” what I’m aiming for in the first place, I’ll never know whether I “got it” or not.
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Ah!
This makes the gnocchi thread much clearer to me. I kept wanting to say maybe you just don’t like gnocchi (I don’t) but somehow felt that wasn’t the answer. Or the question.
I don’t believe that the two topics are even distantly related (other than obviously I want to understand stuff, but lots of people want to understand stuff). There’s nothing about how I can’t picture gnocchi. Nobody even told me anything useful to picture. Me being clumsy in some ways doesn’t affect how I eat, and my actual eyesight is fine - just my ability with imaginary pictures isn’t good.
Still, nobody has said how they can tell when gnocchi is done. I still believe no one on HO can recognize done vs not done. If I give YOU a plate of cold gnocchi and won’t say how I cooked them, how will YOU know which ones are fully cooked and which ones are partly cooked?
I mean, is the real answer “It doesn’t matter, there’s no such thing as undercooked gnocchi”? That’s how people seem to be acting.
If I asked how to recognize undercooked beef or an undercooked pancake, I’d have easy accurate answers in two seconds. (Maybe a few side arguments, but the basic info would be there.)
I mean, imagine some person shows up from another country (or another planet!) and they’ve never made toast or even seen toast. They might ask “How do you know when this Toast thing is done?”. I could easily explain it to them, accounting for different types of bread and personal preference and so on, and I’m confident that after my explanation they would understand, and say “Thank you! Tonight I will make Toast!”.
I wouldn’t tell them “You just know, and if you don’t know already then it’s not worth my time to explain it to you.”
It does help to have a good sense of spatial orientation. Not everyone does. Drawings are hardest for some - picturing a solid object from elevation, section, and plan drawings. Some people have difficulty projecting two dimensions (e.g. YouTube) into the real world. That must be awkward. For those cases I can see the merit of in-person training (itself difficult in the midst of a pandemic).
In my opinion there are two non-obvious non-self-evident pieces of information with regard to knife skills: sharper knives are safer and the esteemed claw grip is awkward to the point of hand cramps until you get used to it.
Einstein is reported to have said doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a definition of insanity. While there is truth to this it does run headlong into persevering and thus practice. It takes self-discipline and self-awareness to stop and ask oneself if a task constitutes practice or is a symptom of insanity. grin
There is also in fairness an overall learning curve that bears on choices. Somewhere, probably in this thread, I talked about tasks for different tasks. I can’t remember the last time I diced so many onions that I used anything except a knife. Recently we sliced two dozen apples for dehydrating and used a mandoline. For cucumber salad for the two of us (realistically six servings) I use a mandoline but for a family gathering I might use a food processor. If I used a food processor to dice onions I’d never have gotten better with a knife. I certainly wouldn’t be making bunnies from olives, tomato roses, or swans from apples.
“If I give YOU a plate of cold gnocchi and won’t say how I cooked them, how will YOU know which ones are fully cooked and which ones are partly cooked?” I probably know, nor would I care.
If you’re talking about the vacuum sealed gnocchi you get down the boxed pasta aisle then I really do think there is no good definition of done if you’re using done as meaning the perfect time to eat - there is no perfect time to eat that stuff (at least in my opinion, worth what you paid for it) as in my opinion that stuff is gooey and dense no matter how long you cook it - done or not. If you are talking about the lighter than air gnocchi my neighbor makes, they just get cooked until heated through. Are they cooked until done? Maybe the answer is no one can tell.
Done can be very very subjective. When is a beef undercooked or overcooked? Carpaccio vs a well done steak. As you note, isn’t that to some degree a matter of personal preference? I like my steaks done well but not well done. Even a medium rare steak would be overdone for me buT maybe not you. Is my steak not done? I like tuna sashimi would it be done if I cooked it? No, it would be ruined. People have been arguing about when a steak is done for ages.
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