Anyone can get phished if, on an off day when you're tired or distracted by personal issues or whatever, your guard is down and you happen to receive a phishing attempt that also pattern matches something you're kind of expecting, either because it's a targeted attempt or just randomly for a wide-net phishing attempt. That's my model of how phishing works, they just make lots of attempts and know they will get lucky some small percentage of the time.

With that as my model: the email getting to your inbox is of course the first failure and increases the chance of getting phished from zero to not zero. Opening the email is another failure that raises the chance. Clicking the link is another.

All of the steps leading up to entering credentials or downloading and executing something from a phishing site is a real failure in that it increases the chances of becoming compromised.

That's even true if you're suspicious the whole way through. If you know it's a phishing attempt and are investigating, fine. But if you are suspicious, that means you can still go either way. You can also get distracted and end up with the phishing link in some tab waiting for you to return to it with all the contextual clues missing.