There is a common assumption that most people touch-type, but your observations tally with my own: most people don't touch type, and certainly not using the "official" method. Probably even most of those who do have a reasonable touch-typing skill use their own ad-hoc techniques. The cause of this, of course, is the terribleness of Qwerty, which makes touch-typing unduly difficult. Once you transition to a good layout, like Colemak, it naturally encourages you to touch-type properly.

And then there is the problem that pretty much every touch-type tutorial tells you to put your fingers like this https://www.ratatype.com/learn/ ... but in fact this is completely irrational as "angle-mod" type fingering (using index finger for the Qwerty C position) is much better.

And then there is the problem of the huge space bar on standard keyboards causing extra inefficiencies by wasting one of your thumbs that could be doing something useful. And other related issues like commonly needed keys like backspace and enter located on the far-right, so you need to move your hands away from the correct touch-type home position.

All these problems are barriers to a good touch-typing technique. It's as though just about every aspect of conventional thinking on keyboards, typing and layouts is obscured in a dense fog of stupidity.

So good luck sorting all that out! :P

Thank you for the great info :)