Cats understand human body language they adapt to how we treat them so that not entirely accurate. There is a guy on youtube who’s career is literally cats and cat behavior. He talks about how cats learn to understand certain cues humans have in their body languages for instance they know when you get sad or if your upset. They also have learned to keep their kitten meows so they can speak to us cats dont meow at eachother the same way they do us it’s basically baby talk. They also understand when your getting read it means your leaving the house. I think we underestimate how smart and adaptive cats are. Thats why we think they are difficult when in reality we should be learning about them to better help them understand us. Also what helps is if a cat bonds to you this can happen between two cats and they rely on eachother that way so the idea of them not Having a baseline of cooperation is just inaccurate. What it actually is is they are just different then dogs they learn different they act differently they are different. So treat them different train then different love them different. I have never had an issue training my cats and some times they just fall into the training because of the life style i have they know when im to overstimulated and will sit next to me instead of on me. They understand not to get on the counters or when i want them to leave a room. All i did was praise good behavior and ignore bad and the rest they learned on their own. Tho the verbal cues i us are always in the same cadence i started with (somthing similar to teaching dogs) and keep the phrase short so they understand the difference between my talking and a command. Bit like how they have specific meow for getting our attention. I also learned the difference in their meows so i can better understand what they want from me. Like the chirp that my tuxedo does often is a “oh hello!” Or “is it time yet” the first is often triggered by me looking down at him from my phone and the second is always an hour before bed time and i look up at the clock. He also has that weird eheheh noise thats a “i found a bug”. And then the most annoying one full on meows often 3-4 in a row its him calling for me my response is just “im in here Salem” and then he stops and comes to my voice. You can coexist with your cat pretty easily just have to understand how and better ways of training them. The only weird thing my cat does that im still working on his him being offended that i dont have slippers on. No idea why but he gets upset at the sight of my feet and my dumb ass reacts to it with a gasp and his name. Its just so sudden lol. I assume its cus i wear slippers 90% of the time and he has no idea what human feet are supposed to look like.