I think I’m in a very similar stage.
Even though my first Microsoft flight sim was 5.0 and I “played” some sims here and there every once in a while, it was only until MSFS and explicitly SU5 (might be coincidence, but with the increased framerate I did feel a lot more in control of the plane) when I suddenly started to become really addicted to this sim and flying in general.
Up until that point I never really looked too much into all the complexity behind flying. Full throttle and off I went, buzzed around for 10mins in some random city and was done for a couple of weeks.
Since then I’ve stocked up on a yoke, throttle quadrant, rudder pedals, navigraph subscription. Flying circuits in the C152 and TBM almost daily. I’m reading SIDs and STARs, doing trips in the A32NX all over the world. I’m currently halfway through reading the PHAK and already have the Pilot Flying Handbook and Instrument Flying Handbook on my shelf to delve into once I’m done with that.
Not sure why it finally clicked after all these decades, but maybe for me the visuals finally reached a point where I could now really pretend to be in an actual plane and not some pixelated/vectorized estimation of the world.