I'm more of a wordcel than a shape rotator myself. It's not that I can't, it's more so that I get terribly bored when doing it. The last time I can remember being excited about it was in elementary school, where I was tested for spatial reasoning and put in some gifted mathematics class. Incidentally, my verbal skills were very poor at the time, I tended towards being very quiet and keeping to myself.

As I grew older and my verbal skills improved, I switched to the abstraction that comes with language. I also became more outgoing; I'm still an introvert but nowhere near what I was when I was a child. I suspect if you took a random Masaai hunter, they would do very well at these kinds of spatial reasoning tests.

Even in my career as a software engineer, I still tend to rubber duck a lot and really excelled at pair-programming. That's why I really enjoy using LLMs when programming now. When I transitioned to engineering management, I learned over the years to get out of the way of my directs who performed better alone; many times I wouldn't even meet with them for a month, and that made them extremely productive.

The issue with a lot of organizations is that they don't account for the variety in problem-solving techniques and abstractions that engineers use. Engineers are not some monolith that always need to be managed from the top-down; you should always play to their strengths and support a variety of problem-solving styles.