My first digital camera was a Fuji S602 pro zoom. I was happy with the image quality but the focusing was way too slow for anything that moved and switching to manual with the FBW lens didn't work for me either so reluctantly I sold it and got a Canon 300D DSLR which fixed the problems I had with the slow to operate Fuji.
I had never read up on digital, I hadn't spoken to anyone about it and I wasn't on line so I was really just going in blind, almost completely blind. I used to treat and use my DSLR just like a SLR because I knew no better. I used to select aperture or shutter priority or manual as I thought best and I dialled in the settings I wanted, including the ISO and off I went. For example I might have selected f8 or 1/250 and ISO 400 or if I was shooting a gig I'd go ISO 1,600 with the widest aperture I could set. One day it dawned on me that I didn't have to set the ISO at the start of the day
I could alter it from shot to shot. WoW! Setting and using the same ISO all day seems idiotic now but maybe you can understand if you remember that I had no idea about digital, I had done no research at all and I just used the camera like an SLR.
I have a few pictures taken with my Fuji that I still look at, just a few, but I have quite a few pictures taken with that 300D and the I'm an idiot basic film settings that I'd dialled in that are still amongst my favorites.
My point is that back then all I cared about gear wise was aperture, shutter speed, ISO and exposure and I managed to ignore / not be aware of anything else and used a DSLR just like a SLR. These days I do fancy things like change the metering mode from evaluative to spot and back, I move the focus point and I sometimes use wide area with face detect and I have auto ISO enabled. I still do old time stuff too like shoot hyperfocal / Merklinger and zone and I use peaking and the magnified view
but I don't have to because if I want to I can fit a 35 or 50mm lens to my fancy digital camera, stick it in aperture, shutter or manual and shoot like it's 1971 when I got my first camera.
I can see how and why some get annoyed at the multitude of menu pages and sub options we have these days and I can see how people long for simpler times but at he same time I do think that a lot of this is annoyance and reluctance to embrace the new stuff is overblown as we can use modern cameras in very basic configurations for a very film days like experience. The biggest physical difference IMO being that todays kit largely doesn't have the metal knobs and dials to set the basic stuff and instead has little plastic wheels which do the same thing but without the old metal kit look and feel.
Anyway, that's just my little story and view
YMMV