I find something similar with parenting advice. When another parent says "you should do this" or "you're doing that wrong", as if they know your kid better than you after a five minute conversation, their advice is essentially useless [0]. They don't actually understand the situational dynamic, they're just imagining something that's vaguely similar and then giving advice based on their imagination.
But when they say "here are the things I tried in this circumstance, and here's how they went" then they're reporting their actual experience (rather than imagining yours) and you are able to take their actual experience and apply lessons learned to your actual experience.
[0] in aggregate -- while any given piece of advice may be helpful, other advice may be the opposite, and there is no reliable way to determine which is which.
But when they say "here are the things I tried in this circumstance, and here's how they went" then they're reporting their actual experience (rather than imagining yours) and you are able to take their actual experience and apply lessons learned to your actual experience.
[0] in aggregate -- while any given piece of advice may be helpful, other advice may be the opposite, and there is no reliable way to determine which is which.