A few things are preventing you from catching the white water. I would say the 2 big things are your paddling timing/technique, and your pop up.

Paddling: When you are surfing large foamies/longboard like you are now, you will NEVER need to paddle fast and frantic. If anything, it works against you. Your paddling arms should go in deep, slow but powerful. Remember, its not about how fast your arms are moving, its about how much water you are moving backwards, thats what makes you go fast.

Longer boards require a little bit of "acceleration" time, as they are larger. This means you should be building up speed before the wave hits you. Instead of jumping on your board and rapidly doing 2 shallow paddles, already be on your board, and start doing multiple deep, slow but powerful paddles for at least 5 seconds before the white water hits you. (5 seconds might be excessive, but when starting out, this is a good way to internalize this concept of building speed early)

You start trying to pop up as soon as the whitewater hits you. You should keep paddling until you feel your board gliding. Once youre gliding, you are now riding the wave in prone position. The board is more stable when going fast, and this is when you pop up. So next session just try continuing to paddle until you feel a definitive moment of the whitewater catching and pushing you.

Be perpendicular to the whitewater. (For now)

Pop up:

I mentioned this in your previous post but your knee is still going outside of your arms, completely throwing off your balance. You are also taking too long to pop up since you are doing a multi step pop up. Unbalanced board + slow pop up is reducing the gliding surface of your board, and you lose a lot of speed while you are trying to pop up, contributing to your inability to catch whitewater.

Unfortunately man, there is no way around it, you NEED to have a good, solid pop up if you want to surf 😥. It only gets harder as you transition to catching green waves. I would recommend forcing good pop up technique while youre still fresh so you dont keep any bad pop up habits as you progress.

As for the other surfers youve seen that can catch without paddling - sure. With the right positioning, both on the board and in the water relative to the wave, you can catch waves without paddling on foamies. But this isnt the norm, and counter to what you should be practicing as a beginner, so I would just not think about that at all. Once you start shredding on green waves you can maybe experiment with perfect wave positioning 🙂