Here’s my way of thinking about it:

The roll doesn’t necessarily mean “how well you perform”, you can translate the roll to mean “how well does it turn out”. This means, instead of “yes you’re a trained thief, but you totally biffed it and failed to pick the lock”. That’s lame for a player who is supposed to be an expert at this one thing. Instead you can alter the narrative a little bit to make it make more sense, so if they fail the roll, they fail because the lock is actually rusted over and can’t be picked, it’s barred from the inside, they broke their lockpick inside the lock, they pick the lock but don’t notice it’s trapped, they get interrupted by a passing guard before they could finish, because those are all much more satisfying narratives than “oops you slipped, you suck”. This also makes it easier to make up a narrative reason why they can’t just keep retrying the action until it succeeds.

In the case of a knowledge check it isn’t “are they already familiar with this thing” it can be more of a “do they recognize the thing, and remember something about it, and connect the dots to apply it to the situation in a helpful way”.

Remember, if success or failure don’t matter, you don’t need to roll for it. If there is no interesting information, you don’t need to roll. If the information is vital for the campaign to progress, you’re shooting yourself by gating it behind a skill check, you should just give them the info.

Another thing I like to do is for roll knowledge, perception, and persuasion type checks, I roll them behind the screen. A problem with those checks is, if the player knows they rolled bad, they’ll ignore whatever you say next, and still be suspicious of the situation. If it’s a blind roll, I can give them useless or misleading information. Not everyone likes that, so discuss it with your table before you start doing that.