There is a lot to unpack there, but it sheds a lot of light onto the popularity (and depending who you ask, the subversion) of the work.

I'll start by saying that people joke about how school doesn't prepare them for the real world, where was "doing my taxes" class, amirite?

Fundamentally I think that an even more critical and teachable skill missing is how to be empathetic. Not like "I have the capacity to feel bad for people", but a more general form of "I can abandon my own preconceptions to allow myself to accurately view the world through their eyes".

That relative illiteracy leads to exactly the longing you express: how to understand what are theople are going to do, and why.

This couples with another favorite observation: when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is going to look like a nail.

What you've described, roughly, is the concept of a breadth-first search. It's a general workable algorithm to establish the type of thing you want to do.

It's inefficient, and especially in the context of a human brain with finite working memory, still prone to suboptimal results. Still better than nothing, but suboptimal given the constraints.

So it's a solution. And, if you didn't have one before, the temptation is to treat that like the hammer.

Because it "works" without a moral evaluation, one might conclude that the moral evaluation isn't important.

And then it's a classic case of the inevitabilities of staring too long into the abyss