Understanding waves feels a bit like the bell curve meme for me: you start with the mental water model, and eventually end up with it again.
Or Feynman: you hear him helpfully talk about bouncy rubber balls, then learn a bunch of stuff over the next decade, and randomly listen to the same lecture again, and suddenly all sorts of „aaaah, that’s what he meant“ lightbulbs go off.
The original link side stepped that as to be honest it is to complicated for the intended use case.
All models are wrong, some are useful, and the water wave model is very useful for very real needs.
I personally wasted a lot of time confusing the map for the territory, but yes everyones path will be different. I confused the "electron flow" and water wave model as being absolute ground truth for way longer than I would like to admit.
https://www.youtube.com/live/ySuUZEjARPY
The dramatic shift in behavior above the audio frequency range is where the water wave lens starts to fall down IMHO.
I was looking at my brothers memory card from a Cray 1a the other day and that video popped in my head. They had the timing traces snaking through several flat-pack chips legs. No wonder they had to move from parity to Hamming code even with exclusively using differential twisted pairs between modules.