these sorts of "rooms"/"boxes"/(read as: isolated presentation environment) are (in my opinion), to a non-zero degree, arguably detrimental to the particular frame of mind and out of the box thinking that are conducive to situational awareness and critical thinking and reactive/proactive problem solving ability in systems one is especially familiar with, which one would be inclined to foster when embarking an undertaking so dynamic and ambiguous as is the concept of being a modern day so-called "hacker". I've got a couple things that lead me to this conclusion.
First, in TryHackMe's case, for example I would speculate is useful for their paywalled content pertaining to teaching myriad techniques to pop shells and shit on arbitrary services by telling you verbatim how to achieve success and request flags as proof that you've actually got the example to work on your own, which is of course a method they came up with to (for lack of a better term) "make sure" that you were at least going through the motions with the flag as a sanity check to ensure you've at least done something which they hope you'll commit to memory.
But for all their effort in telling you what to do and what will happen when you do those things, but they come up short (in my opinion) in the actual scholarship of the lesson. By which I mean to say that they're giving you the equivalent of Dad getting you up to speed your first bike ride without training wheels then lets you go and watches you careen into a wall when you, having not actually learned anything, copy and paste the strings from your notes into the target and are lost on how to troubleshoot your way out of a wet paper bag, let alone a single layer of NAT.
IF YOUTUBERS AND BLOGGERS WOULD REALIZE THAT WRITING A SCRIPT TO READ WHILE YOU RE-RUN COMMANDS THAT YOU'VE ESTABLISHED TO BE ALL CONFIGURED CORRECTLY AND READY TO POP THE SHELL IS JUST GREAT, BUT WHEN THERE ARE MULTIPLE EDITS WHICH ARE OBVIOUSLY TIMES YOU HAD TO STOP AND FIGURE SHIT OUT SO THINGS GO OFF WITHOUT A HITCH IN YOUR VIDEO, IT IS SPECIFICALLY THOSE BORING, ANNOYING, "ARE YOU f*#$% SERIOUS!?" MOMENTS LEFT ON THE EDITING ROOM FLOOR THAT I WOULD SAY ARE AMONG THE MOST VALUABLE LESSONS WHICH EVERYONE NEEDS BUT NOOOOBODY EVER SHOWS BECAUSE THEY'RE EMBARRASSED WHEN THE SHELL DON'T POP. FIGURING OUT HOW TO FIGURE STUFF OUT WHEN YOU HAVE NO ACTUAL CLUE WHAT THE HELL JUST WENT WRONG IS THE HOLY GRAIL OF HACKING LESSONS.
It is for this reason, (hopefully I'm maintaining train of thought here, I feel like I'm rambling) that I always recommend to folks to take on OverTheWire without looking shit up, because if you can make it through bandit equipped only with what you can observe somewhere/how in the shell they present you with, then I would feel confident that I could assign you a target with a specific attack vector and that you could find the way to open the door despite perhaps not knowing even where the door was.
(This is too long already, the rest of this will be extremely reductive)
Another example, in HackTheBox's (and many many others, including THM) case for example, inversely proportional to the on-rails guidance from A (and ONLY A) to B (and ONLY B) I just described, there's these sites which throw you absolutely to the wolves and dare you to see how long you can last before looking up help.
These (not unrealistically, but sure as hell...) unreasonably convoluted, black box challenges which tell you nothing and expect you to find any of these
sorts of random things that they haven't done the least for you in terms of teaching a way of thinking which would even know that these were things that could be considered (even if only on a whim) which you stand no chance and can only hope to retain the info verbatim from the guide, ultimately same as I described above, failing to have attempted anything in the way of actual education that you could walk away with, such as knowing how to know what commands exist and how they can be used in conjunction for unexpected results.
They mean well, and they're great sites with actually really good material, but they rely too heavily (I think) on the will or ability of the average person to autodidactically progress through a syllabus on their own volition in an earnest manner.
TlDr: The thing you mentioned is specifically what I'm suggesting is the bad habits and fallible misunderstanding of the lesson. Because when you paste from your sort of wiki and it errors, you're not going to know why it failed and thus unlikely to rectify it.
TLTLDRDR:
STOP ASPIRING TO LEARN HACKING. ASPIRE TO LEARN HOW YOUR MACHINE DOES WHAT IT DOES. WHAT MECHANISM DOES THE SCRIPT/TOOL USE TO PERFORM THE ACTION.
You think "I wanna learn to hack wifi" and are expecting to just run wifi_hack.sh, failing to realize that the script is doing something like
airmon-ng start wlan0
airodump-ng wlan0mon
aireplay-ng -0 10 -a $TARGET_MAC wlan0mon
aircrack-ng capture.cap -w /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txtfailing to realize that those tools are themselves also just scripts doing something like
ifconfig wlan0 down
iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor
ifconfig wlan0 up
# airodump-ng calls:
socket(PF_PACKET, SOCK_RAW, htons(ETH_P_ALL))
# Then parses 802.11 frames manuallyfailing to realize that those tools are manually handling raw sockets with something like (being extreeeemely reductive)
int sock = socket(PF_PACKET, SOCK_RAW, htons(ETH_P_ALL));
struct sockaddr_ll addr;
struct ieee80211_hdr *hdr = (struct ieee80211_hdr *)packet;failing to realize that the kernel is using the wifi drivers to do shit that's just decades of people bulding upon eachother to have you not care enough to read things and complain when things don't work.
failing to realize that the wifi drivers are manipulating radio frequencies to physically put electromagnetic waves into the air space around you...
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REAL FINAL FINAL TOOOOOOOOOOOOLONGDR: Square one. How do things work?. Go.
"I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing." —Socrates
^ (alt+0151)