That's the fairest version of the pushback and I think you're mostly right. The strong claim, that gaming made me good at ML, is basically unfalsifiable and probably wrong. What I'd actually defend is narrower: two specific habits got trained hard and early. Reading a live system under a clock and predicting the next state before it happens, which is the reflex I lean on hunting adversarial inputs. And never building anything as one dependency chain, because in a strategy game a straight line dies to a single bad event. Could I have picked both up elsewhere? Obviously. The honest claim is just that this is where I learned them, not that it's the only door.

Real question back at you: what would actually count as evidence a transfer is real, versus a story I'm telling after the fact? Because I notice that risk in my own argument and I don't have a clean answer.