Yes, most diagrams are frustratingly static, even those that over lay step by step information on top.
I've found "diagrams" in my head, the mental models I use to reason about a problem, are not static. They are abstract machines, with cogs and gears and clutches and input shafts and output shafts, colors and arrows and action and movement, that work like a map for finding the solution, either directly, or at least leading me in the right direction to find somewhere to easily test my map/model/diagram/machine and probably improve it if I find somewhere it's less than ideal.
The issue is, many of those are not models or diagrams I ever got out of a book or a website. They're all painstakingly, agonizingly built up over years of failure and years of struggle and troubleshooting and riding blind into the thorny thicket of an issue, blindly feeling around for a solution and if I'm lucky, integrating that into a part of my mental model.
Even something like reading XML or JSON involves a good deal of visualized movement or color to be able to parse it quickly, something that no spec or tutorial ever bothers with, if they even could.
All I know is pointers never made sense until I had a class on assembly and was able to step through my program with a view of my entire program memory open and being forced to choose addressing mode for a memory reference before it clicked. Draw all the arrows you want in a textbook, but it wasn't until I saw it moving that I understood the machine.
Same with more complex stuff like Kubernetes. Like ok, draw me a shit load of boxes with labels on them like "LoadBalancer" and "Storage" in them, but if you don't relate that to the 500 line YAML I'm told to blindly apply, I still don't have a model of how any of it works.