Why are we assuming using the terminal is the only way of "telling a computer to do things"? Every way you interact with a machine, you are telling it to do things in theory.

For example

> At a fundamental level, I wasn’t able to tell my computer to accomplish anything that involved logic or stitching together multiple programs

How can that be true if you are telling it to boot on into a os? It doesn't involve logic? Or stiching together multiple programs?

Using a shell =\= telling a machine what to do on a broad level. You are just using the abstractions provided by the os. If you mean get better at shell so you can use it more efficiently than okay cool but that doesn't someone who uses a GUI doesn't "tell" the machine what to do as much as you.