I can intuit a lot of things about music and even visualize some of it, but eventually I hit limitations. What I learn through these intuitions still applies as my ability to mentally visualize or model the music begins to fail, though.
It's similar with vectors. Once you have the orchestral equivalent of vectors, there's no way I'm visualizing it and doing mental geometry. However, what I learned and the modelling I developed from the "casio keyboard playing jingles" equivalent of vectors is still useful and applicable.
I guess this is the point where playing by ear or mentally modelling things fails, and notation is far more helpful. Yet if a lot of us approach these complex works from the notation angle first, we might feel pretty lost and uncertain about what we're doing with it and why.
I can tell I'm not articulating this well, but I like the musical analogy and wanted to get that out.
So I tend to sympathize with the by ear folks.
Richard Hamming has a whole section lecture to make everyone realize precisely this [1]. This was an eye opener to me.
I took many classes in school where we worked with higher dimensional spaces. You wouldn’t send a physics major a lecture on physics, say it was “eye opening”, and expect them to feel the same way about it. It is stuff they have already seen before. Maybe their eyes are already open.
To be honest it’s kind of rude.