I'm reasonably decent at chess, around 2500 Lichess blitz, and I also started chess as an adult. And in my experience visualization was 100% a trained/learned

I'm reasonably decent at chess, around 2500 Lichess blitz, and I also started chess as an adult. And in my experience visualization was 100% a trained/learned skill. Like all players when I was weaker I had no board visualization, and would have difficulty visualizing even simple variations. And then at some point I began to be able to see the board easily. The counter-intuitive thing is that there was no progress, it was like a stair-step. At some point in my 'career' I couldn't see the board at all, then suddenly I could. I think it has something to do with trained pattern recognition, because now when doing things like tactics problems I can generally look at the position for a few seconds and then close my eyes and get to solving it in my head. But I can't do this in weird positions where there's a bunch of pieces in random locations. So my visualization is clearly impacted by some association with familiar patterns. I also think my experience is the rule based on coaching I've done with players of all ages and skill levels. I suspect most strong players aren't familiar with this, because they started playing as children. Nakamura, for instance, hit national master level at 10 years old. I don't trust his recollection of introspective astract/perceptual detail, as a 6 year old, to be particularly accurate. And if visualization is a trained skill with exponential step style progress, then it's completely unsurprising that people would report radically different abilities to visualize things.