I think the most important part of this post was " it’s that not knowing where to start is incredibly intimidating"

I am seeing this today in my current job. I gave a young intern a task to do and 40 minutes later I asked him how was he doing. He responded with a bemused look - "I dont know where to start" My advice was was to think about the task and just start. Start regardless and don't think if its a bad start or not as it will be improved.

Agreed, I still find myself in that position a lot.

My takeaway is that people copy code and implement it without understanding it, and that retyping it can be a way to learn what one is doing. It actually makes me wonder if splitting a program into lines and reading it line by line with the previous and next lines not showing might be another shortcut.

I notice that with big chunks of code, my eyes do tend to glaze over. I expect typing the text helps one chunk it into meaningful segments.

Noah Webster did.