I've embraced my times of magical thinking. That is, each time I embarked on a "diet" with the idea that I'd suffer deprivation for a while, become a normal person, and then eat normally.

All the reasons you list explain the success of pay-per-diet schemes, all the way from WW to Noom.

Returning to the subject at hand, reading nutrition labels is as important as all the other kinds of "counting" most of us have learned over a lifetime of dietary management: calories, macros, etc.

Eventually I realized that my goal was to STOP COUNTING and simply eat. Learning how to eat in the best way for me--and getting used to not eating certain things at all--seems to have brought me to balance. 'Bout time!