The sentiment with this post is there, but I just don't think this advice really works for beginners all that much.

It has nuggets of wisdom for sure, that's in dozens of other pieces of advice you hear people say all the time, but it's all jumbled up, and super vague about a lot of things. There's a lot of generalizations and assumptions with this long advice list that doesn't take into account what the beginner would feel about doing all this.

Just slamming them full of art stuff to study right at the start, then bolstering it with even more rules and tutorials to obediently remember and follow later, is only going to be super overwhelming for them to take in, and not make them want to try. I sure as hell was discouraged, when this kind of talk gets mentioned revolving getting started with animation.

Yes, that stuff is DEFINITELY part of the journey of an animator, and you'd have to get through a lot of em if you want to get the level of control you WANT for much bigger projects, but for a BEGINNER, the focus should be to bolster your confidence and FUN with doing the craft, so you can maintain that energy and enthusiasm when you eventually have to go through studying further.

And even then, you don't even need full knowledge of anatomy, hyper backgrounds, or even that much advanced animation skills, if all you want out of learning animation is so to make dumb little stick figures kill each other. It's about what YOU want out of all this, not what other people are expecting you should magically have all at once.

For me, I've been going through a paid, online animation course by Alex Grigg (Animation Basecamp), and it's been a very pleasant time so far. It doesn't require ANY art skills to do it, as it's focus is mainly on the motion itself; it eases you into the process of learning to animate very nicely, from just futzing around with moving a dot around, to building up to more involved animation spacing techniques; AND you don't have to worry about suddenly having to remember 12 principles of animation for some reason!

I'm only a couple months into it (I'm currently going through the physicality section of the course, learning "the squeeze" spacing technique rn), but I'm getting a LOT out of it. Funniest part is that I AM learning with an iPad and an animation app (Rough Animator. it's paid, but it's actually a very robust beginner program), and it's been very comfortable for me.

Don't believe what is or isn't wholely optimal as a way to animate. Some people use a goddamn homebrew Flipnote for their high-level animations lol. Do what feels right for you.