If there is no penalty for blunders (like a .wallop on VATSIM), then full send, do whatever you want.
However, the reason for the real-life progression is not simply cost and risk, but speed and complexity. There are a LOT of fundamentals involved in flying an aircraft right. It’s very difficult to do things right without, instruction, education, and/or experience, even moreso when doing it yourself in something that’s going to task-saturate you like a high-performance, complex aircraft.
The sim complicates that because there isn’t really an effective method to gain the necessary knowledge and feedback as to whether you’re doing things right. That said, you can just as easily do things wrong in a C152 and never know the difference.
So in the end, it comes down to what you want to get from the sim and perhaps how many of the wrong things you’re willing to allow to slip by in order to get some specific ones down really well.