Yeah I think that is the big conceptual failure of beginners: inability to scale their perception, and "think big" when navigating.
You can still get a little lost if you happen to find a road that's not on the map on your way to the road that is or something of the sort, but usually it's pretty obvious.
> inability to scale their perception, and "think big" when navigating.
This indeed, when navigating a city I always found that I understood 'distances'.
When navigating in nature I tend to really overestimate how much ground I have covered. You are usually moving at snail speed on the typical scale of a topo map.
Getting some intuition on distance covered per unit of time is in my view the missing skill to have when orientering. You need to have a good estimate of casual hike velocity and fast hike velocity to better not underestimate distances.
You can still get a little lost if you happen to find a road that's not on the map on your way to the road that is or something of the sort, but usually it's pretty obvious.