Much of what you say resonates with me. I think that a major problem that very smart young people often have is not meeting older counterparts of themselves. The great mathematician Don Zagier was an extreme prodigy, progressing so rapidly that he earned his PhD at age 20. But despite the fact that he possessed immense innate ability, he needed to learn from a great mathematician in order to become one. He wrote

My first real teacher was in my third year of graduate school, Friedrich Hirzebruch. It was through him that I began to think like a real mathematician. This is something you can't teach yourself but have to learn from a master.

There's some overlap between what you write and Nick Beckstead's post Common sense as a prior, which I recommend if you haven't read it before.

I went through something similar to what you went through, but for me it has a happy ending – it's not that my ideas were wrong all along, it's that I hadn't yet learned how to integrate them with the wisdom of people who were older than me. I suspect that something similar is true of you to some degree as well.