They say you have total control over it

You do.

yet I struggled with terminal blocking me from doing anything unless I run right commands

I mean, would you prefer the terminal simply guess at what you're trying to do and execute random commands?

Looking for hidden files and all.

[xanza@dev ~]$ ll
total 76
drwxr-sr-x   11 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 15 02:05 ./
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root          4096 Mar 10 22:16 ../
-rw-------    1 xanza    xanza         8677 Mar 15 02:05 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--    1 xanza    xanza          887 Mar 13 19:26 .bashrc
drwxr-sr-x    5 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 12 22:37 .cache/
-rw-r--r--    1 xanza    xanza          484 Mar 15 01:38 .caddy
drwxr-sr-x    9 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 12 22:32 .config/
drwx--S---    3 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 11 21:23 .docker/
-rw-r--r--    1 xanza    xanza           52 Mar 10 23:13 .gitconfig
drwxr-sr-x    3 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 10 23:05 .go/
drwxr-sr-x    6 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 12 18:47 .local/
-rw-r--r--    1 xanza    xanza           49 Mar 10 23:41 .profile
drwxr-sr-x    2 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 10 22:38 .sockets/
drwxr-sr-x    2 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 10 22:27 .ssh/
drwxr-sr-x    3 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 15 01:20 .vim/
drwxr-sr-x    4 xanza    xanza         4096 Mar 10 23:08 go/
-rw-r--r--    1 xanza    xanza          267 Mar 12 18:31 justfile

Hidden files in *nix are dotfiles; files which are literally hidden from view because they're appended with a ..