When I was first learning Japanese, the way people taught these concepts definitely felt suspicious - while verbs and adjectives is how we’d explain the concept

When I was first learning Japanese, the way people taught these concepts definitely felt suspicious - while verbs and adjectives is how we’d explain the concepts in English, the terms don’t seem to fit as neatly into Japanese - unsurprising given that the classification comes from a different linguistic tradition. This seems to focus more on how these forms conjugate, as you mentioned. That said, my intuition is that this format might produce equally as confusing patterns.