Some say life is too short to use guides more than very rarely. I say the opposite. I tend to look them up a lot. I can't stand the puzzles in FFX so the latest one I did I just looked up. I looked a few of them up throughout as well.
Sometimes, I like looking up general tips for a game to enhance the experience rather than a specific puzzle or boss.

I got too many games and my time to play games is already short so when it comes to RPGs, I always use a guide.

I tend to use written/typed text guides 99% of the time however if its a game or section I'm truly stuck at, I use video guides.

Though mainly use guides for RPGs, Visual novels (if I want an achievement), and games with multiple endings - I dont use them for action, platformers, racing or fighting games.

Text guide for:

- Controls, come back to a game a long time later, forgot what does what lol.
- Manuals, I learned a lot about prop planes while playing FS2020.
- Getting stuck (usually miss something obvious)
- End game completion, only if a game is so good I want to 100% it but need to figure what I missed. For example for Death Stranding I printed out the list of all possible orders to cross them off while going through the lot to find the missing ones.

I play mostly in VR now so any guide has to wait until in between gaming sessions. Sometimes it works to push on, sometimes you just get stuck (Madison VR) and start another game :/

I use them frequently, to get harder to reach gear, skills, or other upgrades. I don't care about 100% or any sort of trophy or achievement though. Since I play a lot of older games, I tend to use guides more than most, I'd say. Like, right now, I'm playing Might and Magic 6: Mandate of Heaven, and it's quest and area design are extremely confusing. In addition, certain things can be hard to see, because of how the textures themselves look (a classic is hidden switches on walls, that blend in too well). 

Modern games tend to be simpler at their core, you rarely need guides to show you how to finish the game's main story, or even most missions. There are usually obvious markers, handholds tagged with colors, red explosive things, and even distance and/or step counters towards a shouting "point of interest" or quest marker on the map. 

I use them rather often, though mostly to see if I missed something (some secret or just something a bit more hidden) or to see what would have happened if I went a different route.

In older games, this may also include information about enemy and equipment stats

I use them for collectibles when doing clean-up.

Or on the rare occassion a section of a game has me stumped.

means little to me, core experience is having fun and I'd rather be having fun than not.

Opens guide=> What are the missables...If their are none then I just close the guide or it must be something that really is wasting my time and I can't find. but wasting time is mostly with bad games or collectible stuff.

Somewhat often. I dont have the patience - and specially I dont have the time as I used to - so I need to speed things up sometimes. So yeah, checking up a guide or a map is neccesary. Specially since the genre I play the most are Rpgs, and often times theres quests that are too convuluted, and I dont have the hours to dedicate for them.

Ive got no time to be exploring Caelid for hours to discover the secret dungeon hidden behind an invisible wall to finish Sellen's quest. Aint nobody got time for that.

If I'm playing a game that has puzzles thrown in then I'm looking up the solution online. I have ZERO interest in wasting my time solving puzzles. That is not why I'm playing the game. RPGs are terrible about this and I hate it.

I want text/image based guides. I only use a video guide if that is all I can find.

I will also use a guide if a game has a lot of hidden content that there is really no way you can figure out yourself without playing the game multiple times.

We are very much aligned :)

I don't restart files, but I do like to keep my first save as a sort of keepsake (it's silly, I know).

I also hate not being able to figure out something myself; it feels like defeat, or even cheating, if I have to rely on someone else to show me the way.

Finally, I totally get your perspective on a game feeling like "magic". I remember someone posting in the forum several years ago about horror games, questioning why anyone would be scared by what is clearly a program in a computer. And I responded saying I'm scared because I go in wanting to be scared. I want to believe in the illusion.