Ah, interesting. Back in my presentation days, I found that, if I pretended to be a fire and brimstone preacher when I practiced speeches, and dialed it back when I actually gave the speech, those speeches went a lot better, and were better received.

I'm really good at accents because I imitate exactly. People think I'm a native when I say hello then I can't understand anything after that because I'm really bad at remembering vocabulary.

It's kind of scaring me off moving to another country to learn the language because I struggle to remember words in English. At the same time I know I would master the words and phrases I do learn plus I've always wanted to try being immersed in another culture. Terrified of not being understood I guess.

lol this is me with Spanish. I say common phrases with all the details right, so people think I know more than I do. I actually speak better than I understand.

If you go from non-functional to functional with extraneous crap that’s a success. Unless you’re working at the forefront of research or at the absolute limits of your capabilities an explicit mental model of what you’re doing is of surprisingly little use. Even that exaggerates how useful it is. The huge majority of improvement is by trial and error, with shoddy and incomplete mental models.

Your last paragraph is just what happens when there’s no force demanding quality. If there’s not strong pressure to maintain or improve quality decline is inevitable.