[painted-now]

I had a very similar experience studying physics and I still have some form of that in my current job as software engineer working on a quite large code base:

I really can't operate on things for which I don't have a deep intuition. If I really have to treat something as a blackbox, I need to explicitly spell out the assumptions and "compress them enough" (which is actually probably also just about building an intuition on those assumptions).

I envy people a lot that can just "copy & paste" some knowledge in their thinking.

I think I now got to the point where I accepted that to be a part of me and made it "my brand" and I see that I can add value with being different in this aspect.

I often wonder how it must feel like to be able to "copy paste" knowledge. If you painstakingly have to sweat through all kinds of things that others can just "copy&paste", it can feel like others are "cheating" - but in the end it's just me being jealous.