I think it depends on what intuitions you start out with.

If you teach yourself programming as a kid like I have, and get to know about object-oriented programming very early on, normalization is more intuitive. "of course the addresses go in a separate table from the users, just as you'd have an `address` object instead of just putting all the fields inside `User`."

If you start out using Excel a lot, and learn programming much later, the Excel way probably seems right at first. "Of course there's going to be a table with customer information, one row per customer, with separate fields for street, city, zipcode etc."