I think it's because the human mind tends to jump over things which don't seem important, as a performance optimization. But its idea of what's not important is

I think it's because the human mind tends to jump over things which don't seem important, as a performance optimization. But its idea of what's not important is not well-tuned to many contexts. I think a lot of "secret tricks" are just ways of trying to bypass that heuristic and force yourself to do all the steps. E.g. rubber-duck debugging: putting the situation into words means putting it into concrete terms, which catches the parts that your brain let sit unexamined.