Yes!! This is exactly what happened to me with JavaScript. I watched like 60 hours of courses and still couldn't build anything without following along step by step. Then I made a dumb little to-do list app and spent two whole days just figuring out why my buttons weren't working, turned out I had a typo in a function name the whole time. That one dumb bug taught me more about reading errors and checking my own code than any video ever did. Tutorials make you feel smart because everything works when someone else writes it, but you don't learn to think through problems that way. Now I build first and only look stuff up when I'm actually stuck on something real.

Hang in there, because that shoulder pain is no joke and you already found something that works for your body. I get the guilt about counter space and cleanup though, that stuff wears you down in a different way than sore arms do. Your neighbor makes a fair point about the mixer and cold dough, but she is not the one cranking out 15 dozen a month, so only you know what your hands and shoulders can take. Maybe time yourself both ways for a couple weeks and let the numbers decide instead of the guilt. Either way you are not wrong for buying it, you were solving a real problem.