[s0ulphire]

It sounds like what you're describing is the end goal in the "hierarchy of competence", where "unconscious competence" is the last step. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

That is the ideal goal, but I don't think the two ideas are exclusive. Take the case of learning a new skill like Chess. At the start you employed some sort of system to learn; that system is your own personal 'mental model' that you've constructed (whether consciously or not) to learn this new thing.

How long does it take you to reach unconscious mastery in chess? Once you reach that level of mastery, looking back would you say there was a different system you could have employed to reach that goal faster? What if you shared this new system with a beginner and told them "use this model to learn, not the one that seems intuitive to you now".

I think that's all a mental model is: recognising that other people who are better at the thing you're trying to do, have come up with a way to learn it faster than you're capable of intuiting as a beginner. I think it would be quite hubristic to assume you couldn't save any time by employing these ideas, or that your initial ideas are so close to the best approach that learning about another model is a waste of time.