Fortunately most of these tutorials have copy/paste fields that list out the contents of each command in plain text so you can make sure you know what you are running. Although unfortunately there’s no easy way to incorporate non-acronym or shorthand text within the actual commands themselves (since terminal commands are intentionally shortened for decreasing the amount of typing required per manual command), but good tutorials will include an explanation of what each copy/paste line is doing (sounds like you might’ve witnessed some bad ones).

In regards to gatekeeping, at some point it’s an unfortunate byproduct of users on forums sharing answers that “you should already know why this command is here and what it does”, because they’re tired of explaining to people who should really read the troubleshooting guides included in their distro, or are burnt out from offering their time repeatedly over and over. Nobody is being paid to give you advice, and that’s a double edged sword - because they are doing this out of a genuine desire to help users like you, but aren’t willing to deep dive like a professor would during their paid office hours.

With all that being said, those of us who enjoy using the terminal whenever possible are more than happy to share our secrets with you - just realize you may have to read and copy some lines of text from time to time and check a wiki, instead of a GUI installer. Since we’re not all on Mint XD