I agree it isn't 100% perfect for every situation. But I can think of plenty of instances where ditching colors, lowering resolution, etc. have been totally fine (and often essential) for gaining a level of intuition. As some other comments noted, this intuition may be flawed, mostly because it's hard to know what you don't know. As a result, you are still more informed than you might have been before, but you also might not know much more.
however, being able to mix and match properties is really what most good plotting and visualization is all about. having done a bunch of ray tracing, my intuition around lighting and light is much better. I am not even good 'anechdata' so take that for what its worth, but I found visualization to be much more intuitive than reading e&m textbooks/lectures. I'm not sure if knowing a phenomena as bottom up or top down is really a guarantee (nor am I suggesting that symbolic reasoning is bottom up or down), but seeing something is just so efficient for some people. Like anything powerful, it just needs to be used judiciously and with asterisks.
