I think a relevant gap you may be underestimating is "if you finish your solder job and it just doesn't work, what now"? Just getting some melted metal onto a

I think a relevant gap you may be underestimating is "if you finish your solder job and it just doesn't work, what now"? Just getting some melted metal onto a thing is really ~none of the skill cap that makes it "scary", when it inevitably doesn't work, the skill involved in debugging it, fixing the issue (desoldering), identifying if you fried other small cheap components that may need to be replaced, that's really the part that makes soldering a scary skill. FWIW I think this is an example of a broader class of "being a beginner is much harder than knowledgeable people think"; if you're skilled then you also actually don't make nearly as many basic mistakes to begin including the connection being bad, accidentally shorting, wrong polarity, wrong sized component, and you'll recognize something might be problematic right when it happens. That means you don't even need to do noideadog debugging when a beginner must. You can probably imagine doing "carefully solder and just fail the project if it still doesn't work at the end" being a strategy that would have a pretty good success rate, when it would actually have a dismal project success rate for an actual beginner.