In the USA licenses are not contingent upon manual vs. automatic. No one checks what car you drive. So you would have to learn somewhere - someone around you has to own a manual car in order for you to learn how to drive one, and here simply no one does. No one in my entire extended family, none of my friends, none of my coworkers I’m friendly with, none of the 50+ cars I have any tangential access to are manual. So even if I wanted to learn, what are my options? Buy an entire car just to learn? Services like Turo won’t let you rent one unless you can drive one already.
We have Driver’s Education in high school but it involves no actual driving - there are separate paid/private courses you can take that might involve defensive driving or learning stick. I did one on controlling skids on wet or snowy pavement and demonstrating e.g. turning under braking with and without ABS. But nothing about manual.
Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.
Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.
I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.
Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they’re now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just… is not. Especially not in first person games.