You can lol, most people on fightcade or ladder start in their 20s. There's much more to fighting games than combos, they're tertiary. Go try fightcade, seriously. Plenty of new people constantly joining, and plenty of newbies in general in 3rd strike. Street Fighter is about footsies and spacing, much more than it is about combos. That's anime fighters.

It's like saying someone is a masochist for playing CS2, it doesn't make any sense to anyone who's actually played the game, you strags always overestimate how serious people are.

Most fg players are fricking terrible at them and that's fine. Tribes unironically has a higher skill floor than fighting games. If you can ski in tribes you have the motor skills to play fighting games.

Most fighting game players are also liers. Neighbors will prescribe the 1000 step training program needed to grind training mode for 500 hours just to get your foot in the door, and then be lifers in gold league/green square/7th floor/whatever place their chosen game's r-slurred ranking system has for absolutely middling players. Me and my offsite fg friends were basically all tournament caliber players at one or more games, and 1 out of the 5 of us uses training mode half as much as the worst redditor claims to.

Fightcade is good because it's free, but the players there will be better than average just based on how niche it is compared to something like street fighter 6. Even still, games like 3rd strike are mainstream enough that there are poor enough players there for just about anyone to have fair matches.

All you need to get good at fighting games is a few guys to play with, and a decent attitude. For all the shit fg players will spout off about, all it takes to improve is finding a game you enjoy playing, and playing it.