Not a psychology researcher and this wasn’t a study so I can’t vouch for “accurate”. Think of that graph as a distillation off my observations and experiences into 4 lines.

The idea I’m trying to share is that understanding compounds. The more you understand, the faster you can gain new understanding. And the more frameworks you have for the world, the faster you can gain knowledge because you need fewer examples to grok something.

For example, once you understand how browser-server communication works, picking up a new library is just a matter of syntax and names. You already know the concepts and what to expect. You might even be able to predict/guess what the functions are called based on knowing what the necessary operations are.