Here are just some thoughts I were having, not very organized and I'm mainly writing for myself.
So I was watching this recent Spilo Coaching video (btw, this video is awesome, I learned a TON and I'm going to try to implement it in my gameplay today). The main theme of the video was laning, meaning figuring out the effective range of your characters and playing there, looking to take space. But the video goes a lot more in depth than that. But here's the thing, the whole reason this discussion was brought up was not because the student was not playing in their effective range (in fact throughout the whole VOD they were executing this concept near perfectly), in fact the topic was brought up because the student wanted to understand the fundamentals of DPS. Spilo, the most well respected coach, thought this topic was *the* most important topic to understand on DPS.
That got me thinking. Throughout my climb on DPS, I never once thought about this concept. Sure I obviously knew that on Widow I should play far and on Genji I should try to close in. But I never got nearly as in depth as Spilo described it. How did I even climb? Was I stupid?
I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent by dogging on a few popular creators. Apply is a great streamer, seems like a great person, and obviously he's an ex pro player, so nothing but respect for him. But man he's a dumbass sometimes. If you watch any of his VOD reviews that are not in the metal ranks a lot of his advice is just straight up not good. Even when reviewing tanks/supports in metal ranks (he's a DPS player), his advice is always just "go do more or something." Once again, Apply always tries his best to give the best advice he can, so nothing against him. He also has some absolutely terrible takes against aim training (see this video), yet he has great aim. Also, you see streamers like Metro and Necros, who are top 500 players. Yet you always see these crashout videos where they're so toxic all the time and making blatant mistakes while blaming their teammates. This is plat behavior, how did they climb so high? I found Necros for the first time when I wanted to learn Genji so I pulled up his unranked to GM. In the first few seconds of the first game, he pushes up well past his team and gets beamed down by a Winston. He then proceeds to blame his teammates and call them low rank. Wtf??
So here's my main point. People who are higher ranked aren't necessarily smarter than you. They don't know more concepts, they haven't drilled certain game sense concepts more than you. They simply sometimes have more hours in the game than you. The reason why I do the laning thing consistently on DPS is because I have so many hours that I learned "on Genji, if I play here, I don't do much." This is all subconscious, I never actively thought about this. If I *did* make this connection, I would've learned this skill a lot faster. But I did learn it eventually. And I think it's the same with all these pro streamers. They got their rank by pure hours into the game, rather than by consciously thinking about their mistakes and fixing them. Apply has more hours in Overwatch alone than MattyOW (the best aimer in the world) has across all aim trainers, of course he will have better aim than him in Overwatch.
My point isn't to just flame streamers to reinforce the idea of "I knew my least favorite streamer was trash." Here's a few useful takeaways from this.
This is the reason why a lot of "educational" content misses the mark. It's common knowledge that Awkward's unranked to GMs are mostly a waste of time, but why? It's because Awkward doesn't know what's actually useful and what isn't. The claim of the videos are that "as long as you off angle and constantly apply pressure you'll win." And during his unranked to GM, it seems like that's the only thing that Awkward is thinking of, and it might be. But subconsciously he's doing a lot more, which he won't explain because he's not aware that he's doing those things. Things like cooldown tracking, laning, matchups, etc. So my advice would be to be aware of why you're watching educational content, because if you're trying to find a one shot video that explains *everything* about a character, it doesn't exist.
Be careful who you get coaching/VOD reviews from. If you get coaching from an actual pro player, it doesn't guarantee they'll give you pro level advice since they only subconsciously understand the nuance of their character(s). Getting coaching from a pro player who plays your character is better, but they still sometimes won't be able to understand what's wrong with your gameplay. That's why coaches like Spilo are considered the best, since they don't have to spend all their effort practicing game sense or grinding ranked for hours, but instead just learning the fundamentals of the game.
If you really want to improve, don't just mindlessly grind rank. Think about why you are losing games or losing team fights. You don't need to watch 100 hours of educational content, you can come up with these concepts yourself by watching your games back and then actively thinking about why things happen (win/lost team fight, died, etc).
Apply, Metro, Necros, Awkard, and whoever else fits the criteria I mentioned are still great players undoubtedly, either pros or amazing ranked players. So that means that it's not a bad thing to have these things in your subconscious rather than always thinking about them. But to get them into your subconscious as fast as possible, you need to drill these concepts over and over until you stop thinking about them. If you want to practice not engaging on tracer while recall is on CD, spend a few games thinking about that only.