Also even with fighting games I think phil is basically just playing by himself independent of what the opponent is doing instead of actually reacting to them, if that makes any sense. Like phil knows how to push the buttons in the right order and timing to do moves and combos so he just spams them out regardless of what the other player is doing. You can tell how angry he gets when the other guy does something phil wasn't expecting because phil just expects every other player to use the same patterns he knows how to play against and gets thrown off when someone does something he has to respond differently to. Its why he never gets anywhere with new fighting games, he doesn't actually really know how to play them that well.
It's honestly more than that.
Phil is what we used to call an "O-Eighter", which is an fighting game player who started playing seriously in 2008, and they usually carried some weird ass philosophies about learning fighting games. One of which is that Street Fighter 2 Turbo was the ideal fighting game, and if you learned Super Turbo, you could learn any fighting game. This, of course, is not true; the game had several faults, like combos that automatically dizzied you, tons of fireball spam, some loops that were just hard to get out of, several balancing issues, and the use of "Old" versions of characters (basically, Old characters couldn't use Supers, but they compensated by dealing more damage than the normal version of the character). The game was imperfect, and yet 2008 players thought otherwise.
Guilty Gear, Blazblue, Soul Calibur, Tekken, hell
any fighting game plays wildly different from ST. O-Eighters will argue that ST taught you the basics of some fighting games, but you don't deal with fireballs in Soul Calibur, and you don't get stunned from combos in Tekken. They're different games with very different mechanics. But a lot of the 2008 evolved from this mindset and have been putting in their time and adapting to the plethora of fighting games that have come out since then, and have even shifted their original views on ST.
Phil did not.
I bring this up because Phil has picked up some bad fucking habits from Super Turbo that he applies to other games, and it shows: always starting combos with jump-in attacks, panic mashing, punishing jump-in attacks with sweep, haphazardly throwing out normal attacks on neutral. These are things I notice when he plays EVERY fighting game if the mechanic calls for it, and this is because Phil is still in that O-Eighter mindset. Phil is not only adopting outdated strategies when he plays fighting games, but he's also adopting strategies in fighting games that have been proven false for over a decade. It's no wonder he never gets better.
Nowadays, it takes more shit to learn a fighting game. You have to hit up training mode, you have to read frame data, find how to punish attacks, and the combos you get from successfully punishing. You have to also be willing to lose and suck it up. All this is hard to do for someone who values instant gratification above all else, has no patience in learning anything that isn't told to him, refuses to use in-game mechanics that aren't outright told to him, and never holds an L and doesn't default to blaming lag.
Phil expects patterns because he barely players real players and likely beats on unmoving computer punching bags in training mode. He think players operate on the same outdated mindset he does because for whatever reason, Phil sees himself as the prime example of a fighting game player. If they aren't doing what he's doing , then they're scrubs, and he's never going to think otherwise.
TL; DR: Phil plays fighting games like a boomer and will never get better unless he puts the time to learn shit.