Shooting yourself in the foot really helps to built intuition!
Playing with your router is still a pain though, especially if you don't have a device with an Ethernet port. You learn all sorts of fun things like "If you change your router's IP address you get logged out of its management at the old IP address" and "Oh, that's what subnet mask means, weird."
Most definitely. The old lessons were hard learned, and they stayed with you. Going through everything, trying all the combinations, and reading obscure materials for any hints.
I don't want to glorify the old hard way of spending perhaps days on problems that ended up being trivial, but it's obviously different now when one can get all the answers and helpful scripts directly from LLMs. Much less is retained.