I can relate. I was overweight most of my life. I had to peel away layers of bad narrative and misunderstanding, and also train my discipline circuits to get "lean". And it's still a struggle every day. I'm one of those people who gain weight on a lot less calories than other people. My wife is 2 inches shorter and weighs 50 lbs less than I, and eats twice the calories per day. Mind you, we track every gram of food and weigh it on a scale, and enter it into a diet tracking app (Cronometer in our case). So I am SUPER familiar with everything you are saying.

What I am getting at is that most people are not able to initially grasp this nuance, and the fundamental fact is that there IS a threshold of calories where you WILL lose weight no matter what. It's up to every individual to work on their motivation, but frankly that's orthogonal to the facts of the matter, and it's better to be direct rather than tell half-truths because it's "complicated". I almost never see discussions of motivation and differences in metabolism in these types of threads elsewhere, and to just assume the average person understand these factors is a mistake. The first thing people need to learn is that cutting down food will lose weight, point blank. Then you can add on layers about metabolism and motivation as the journey continues.