So like, I've heard about this for ages but I struggle understanding. I definitely cannot "see" anything when I close my eyes, I definitely cannot "see" anything in my mind/imagination. I can "picture" things but that picture is more or less an emotional feeling about the thing, I can imagine certain parts of it but it's more or less a conversation with myself about what I would see or experience about the thing, as if I were describing something that I'm feeling while blindfolded.

When they say visualize something in your head, do people actually see something as if they were looking at it? Else I just figured that visualizing meant more or less an analogy of how we make sense of the actual experience.

They play it poorly. Source: aphantasiac with short term memory disabilities who can't learn chess well bcit's too much visualization and memory

As someone who has aphatasia , I must say there is a difference . I feel like I have a better than average (at least for my ELO which is ~600) intuition but worse board awareness . I also can't easily search into the game tree , though that may also be due to lack of training .