Well, you managed to describe the usage of those without using verbiage that mentioned the term transitive, and without great technical detail, so I don’t think you disagree at all. Nobody is saying don’t learn the grammar. I’m saying don’t laboriously memorize scholarly factoids about the grammar.
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I normally make a point to deliberately avoid linguistic terms when learning or teaching grammar because that’s exactly what turned me off from learning Spanish in middle school (I remember wondering “how is something like ‘reflexive verb’ supposed to be meaningful to me in Spanish when I have no idea what that means in English?”)
That being said, there are a few words that are just too helpful to ignore, like noun, verb, and in the case of Japanese, I’d say transitivity (namely, transitive vs. intransitive verbs). The difference between things like 下がる・下げる、出す・出る、助かる・助ける is IMO big enough to be worth actively learning which word means what, and being able to categorize them as “transitive verbs” (他動詞) or “intransitive verbs” (自動詞) helps a lot, especially if you take advantage of the patterns I outlined in my other comment. Besides, the difference may even be intuitive already if you remember the “transitive property” from mathematics.
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Yes! Tofugu has a really good article about transitive and instrantisive verbs. I discovered it yesterday while experiencing the exact same struggles lol.
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On the other side of that coin, one can also realize that each of those words are different words that perform a different function.
In thinking in English, my native language, I don’t think, “How do I transform X word from an adjective into an adverb?” Or, “How do I rewrite this sentence to make the verb passive or active?”
I consider what tense the sentence is in, who or what is the topic, whether the verb(s) are active or passive, what is being described, and what the result was.
To me, the process of transforming one word into another word, or attempting to contrast two words, as part of the learning process, adds extra steps. You are very correct that we don’t “fall” the ball. I’m sure every person fluent in English will collectively wince a bit hearing that. To become fluent in a language is to be subconsciously aware of collocations that don’t make grammatical or logical sense and having that wince reaction. That comes with egregious amounts of exposure.
Once you have achieved some level of functional fluency, then you can play around with transforming words and revising sentences.
Short story short: Learn to express something as simply as possible, and then expand on that.
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I’m Mexican, I don’t think I had heard this before.
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Lool I know what you mean. As far as the Crabigator is concerned, the mnemonics help (trust me) but what I think drives it home is making my own little twist to make it stick. Doesn’t have to be a paragraph could be a simple sentence, phrase or word. Another thing you could try is making sentences to illustrate the difference as quite a few verbs have transitive and intransitive pairs.
頑張れ!!! 
For me, the key to getting the transitivity of verbs right is to be able to recall the other part of the pair. The question “is上げる transitive or not?” is a lot more difficult to answer than the question “out of 上げる and 上がる, which one is transitive?”. Once you get there, you can actually apply some simple pattern recognition like the ~す or ~ある patterns already mentioned. If there is no other part of the pair, the verb is (almost?) always transitive. Additionally, it helps me to use some simple rules to determine transitivity, and then use mnemonics for the pairs that are exceptions to those rules. The more rules you can remember, the less exceptions there will be, but the harder it will be to remember all the rules, so there is always a trade-off.
Would recommend getting some samples from Tangorin (https://tangorin.com) or a similar sentence repo.
I skimmed through and picked two good examples of how 上げる and 上がる differ in use.
軽くひと泳ぎした僕は、水から上がってプールサイドに腰を下ろす。
After a light swim, I came up from the water and sat down on the poolside.
調節レバーを上に上げると座面の高さを調節できます。
You can adjust the seat height by moving the adjustment lever up.
A lot of people have shown what they do to distinguish between transitive/intransitive pairs. What works for me is gathering a pool of samples if I have trouble remembering which is which in a particular pair.
this + causative/passive forms are really big roadblocks for beginner and intermediate learners. With time it will come naturally through exposure and repetition, but it is frustrating.
those are easy verbs
when it happens with to damage, to be damaged, to be leaned, to lean, to get cold, to freeze etc all those dont work
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