So I'm just wondering if this happened to everyone else because a few friends of mine at work have corroborated my experience.

So, when I was very young and just starting to learn PHP, I was trying to grasp OOP. I read and read about it and did the example tutorials and nothing really did it for me. Then one day, writing some scripts for a game I played, it just hit me. Literally like "oh.....I get it. That's why this is a thing."