It really depends on the person. I've been involved with music in some capacity basically my entire life. I can do pitch but I have never been able to maintain a tempo to save my life (to an almost morbid degree).

I could practice technical skill on an instrument to literally no end but ultimately anything I did outside of a several second stretch by myself was completely disoriented due to a total and complete inability to maintain a tempo even when it's provided to me.

So for me there is just a hard ceiling on my ability to ever perform. I could probably do better with digital music production if I invested the time and energy into it but I'll always have the handicap that I have and knowing that it's hard to even want to invest the time and energy into trying yet another path into music where I'll likely fall flat on my face again.

Until my late 20s, I was bad with both pitch and rhythm despite playing guitar for over a dozen years. Then I took singing lessons with a professional opera singer for 9 months, one hour a week.

She stressed how important it was to record myself and listen back, in fact she encouraged me to do it for hours at a time. The immediate reaction the first few days of trying this was "holy crap, not only am I pitchy and can't hear it naturally, I'm constantly slowing down and speeding up like +/- 10bpm."

The experience was so distressing that I tried to quit my next lesson, but she pushed back with "Hey if you can hear it, you can fix it. It won't be tomorrow, or next week, or even next month. It could take a year. Improvement happens little by little. And I guarantee you'll see progress as it happens. But you have to put in the work."

After a few weeks of working up to it, I settled into a pattern of spending ~3-5 hours most weeknights in the darkness of my closet, recording myself playing Beatles songs along with an acoustic guitar into a 4-track. Usually just going back and forth over 4-8 bars of a song for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes another section, really just focusing on a couple songs like that. Toward the end of the session I'd attempt several full run throughs, get super frustrated (over increasingly minor issues), and end the session.

And she was right, by about the third month I was comfortable enough to perform in front of the person I was seeing, and by month five, I could get through a song with barely any mistakes, maybe one out of three chances. By the ninth month, after a 15 minute warmup, I could get through a 3 song stretch with just minor errors, enough not to totally embarrass myself at an open mic night.

At that point I felt I hit my goal and took a break from lessons. Never did an open mic night. Continued practicing a bit in my closest, but after a month or two I stopped as well.

And here 20 years later, my rhythm actually is pretty solid... I've been a consistent bedroom guitarist, and routinely record myself, and sometimes I don't bother with a metronome because it sounds that consistent. That said, I stopped singing and that ability is completely gone. But I am starting a similar process learning classical guitar.

So I go back to that original bit of advice with just about anything I try to tackle now... if you're self-aware of your issues, and can actually critically hear them in a recording, then there is a path forward.