I think you're right. But I also think this is a fundamental limit of human thinking, to some extent.
If you consider the space of all possible imaginable futures, there are parts of this space that are easily accessible to us, and there are parts that just don't seem to be accessible at all. For example, people were able to foresee the technical development of the internet decades ago, but we're not able to foresee how internet culture will develop with any accuracy at all.
It's like the philosophical idea that you can't accurately imagine what it's like to be a genius, because if you could, then you could become a genius yourself, just by imagining what a genius would do in each situation. If we could accurately imagine the future, then the future would already be here, to some extent. E.g. if I could predict what the next hit smartphone app would be, then I could just build the app myself and get rich.
I disagree that it is a 'fundamental' limit, I think you can practice holding "impossible" things in your head so that you can work out where the places are where the "possible" things are at the edge. Using your example, you can't accurately imagine what it's like to be a genius but you can "pretend" you're a genius, and imagine that if you were a genius you would know lots of stuff about a lot of different things, and from there recognize you would need to learn about lots of different things. And from there recognize that you'd need to know how to learn quickly so that you could know lots of different things. And from there find techniques for learning things quickly and start trying different ones to see if any work for you.
That is the 'walking it in reverse' idea, if you start with this impossible idea (your own or someone else has presented it to you) and you want to figure out sort of that impossible idea might come to be real.
Just to continue this tangent: The skill you mention (holding impossible things in your head) is closely related to debugging. You observe "impossible" things (returned signal power is negative, etc.), and accept them, and work backwards to how it could happen.
How many times have you had a junior person come to you with a bug, and you ask, did you check A, B, and C? And they will say, "I checked everything and it's all OK." It's hard to kick their brain out of the rut of thinking that everything is nominal. They make no progress because they're wasting all their mental energy arguing that everything is, in fact, OK.
If you consider the space of all possible imaginable futures, there are parts of this space that are easily accessible to us, and there are parts that just don't seem to be accessible at all. For example, people were able to foresee the technical development of the internet decades ago, but we're not able to foresee how internet culture will develop with any accuracy at all.
It's like the philosophical idea that you can't accurately imagine what it's like to be a genius, because if you could, then you could become a genius yourself, just by imagining what a genius would do in each situation. If we could accurately imagine the future, then the future would already be here, to some extent. E.g. if I could predict what the next hit smartphone app would be, then I could just build the app myself and get rich.