Not sure what you mean. I was fascinated by the idea of telling a machine what to do before I got started. That's what got me started. I tried it out with the first programmable machine I could get my hands on, which turned out to be a calculator, everything since feels like a new and cool variation on the theme of telling a machine what to do. Data structures, OOP, functional programming, parallelization, web servers, they have the benefit of being fun to think about in their own right, but within programming, they're still just tools to solve specific problems (better). Initially I assumed that all problems had a solution like this, turns out there are some fundamental limits to that, but thinking about those is more math than programming (and a good reason to prioritize math and fundamental understanding over getting married too closely to any particular programming paradigm).

Perhaps the closest to an epiphany that I had was in an AI course, realizing that building machines that don't take instructions but rather examples of what to do is a full paradigm in its own right. But arguably that's separate from programming (and imho underscores why understanding the fundamentals is more important). When it comes to memorizing syntax, that's just a function of how long and how recently I've been using that particular tool, it builds up and also decays fairly quickly, that aspect doesn't feel fundamental at all.