I think you're right -- I feel that head empty no thoughts when I code at work so it probably is just an experience thing!! One day I will be like that about game dev coding but that's not today LOL
And thank you! I really think being around my regular team and talking with them about coding stuff, even if I never looked at or touched the code, did really help me learn and I passively soaked up all that knowledge. I found those Flappy Bird style tutorials super hard bc I would run into bugs and not know how to fix them because I didn't actually understand what I was writing; I was just copying the video. So in some ways having that control in a project made it a lot easier since (most of the time) I knew exactly what I wanted to do, even if I didn't know the details of acheiving it.