I’m a 30 year Private Pilot ASEL with an instrument rating and some complex time, and roughly 3,000 hours.
It’s the same as watching Saving Private Ryan, versus having actually landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day. You get a sense for the experience, but you don’t have the same life and death consequences or the need to maintain the same situational awareness.
I’ve been using MS Flight Sim for 35 years and the last 20 (since FS8) to review procedures and airport environments before actual flights. I used to have to add hundreds of dollars of photo scenery, airports, and planes, but with MSFS2020, I can use that default application with little tweaking. The environment is as close to reality as you can get in a 2D world without G forces, etc.