I don't see how you can learn anything without such taste. To learn you have to be able to know what can be done better. Or someone tells you.
I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that next milestone.
Parent seems to refer to taste _being in the way_ of learning (not the lack of it) and I definitely get the sentiment. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the stuff I could have learned when I was young: I had a C64 and I could have learned assembly programming, if I just had met anyone with an actual disk of an assembler program and my library had a book about it, nothing of which was the case.
But then again, if there had been YouTube already, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been immediately discouraged by some 4-year old whiz kid somewhere in the world doing it better than me.
Back then I was the king of computer science because I was comparing myself to the rest of my rural high school. Now where I'm instantly comparing myself to 4 billion people, that can get pretty discouraging pretty quick.
There's so much educational content on YouTube, I envy my brother who has access to courses from CMU, MIT, and Stanford, and countless other presentations he can learn from. Kids, on the other hand...have it worse, ironically, when they should be the ones benefitting the most from all the accelerated learning on offer.
I think the suggestion is that at the earliest levels of mature fields where you've got a lot of basic and technical skills to develop, you're not really able to do much useful with your taste, and it's more likely just to depress you with how far you have to go.
You will need that taste to progress eventually, but in the more mechanical early phases it can be a distraction.
I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that next milestone.