I don't think people who are new to Bitcoin are still late. But if I had learned about it when it first came out, I could have gotten a better result for me. So there is buying bitcoin then and buying bitcoin now. If I had learned the technology then, my life would have been different.
Bitcoin was different in the past. In the beginning there was no monetary value for it, and you could get 50 BTC from just clicking "Generate Coins" on a windows application overnight.
Many people got quite a lot of coins like that and then lost it all since they couldn't really do anything with them.
At some point people were hesitant to pay twenty bucks or so (price of 2 large pizzas) for 10 thousand BTC.
It's easy to romanticize the idea that you would have done the perfect thing back then, but in reality the most probable outcome is that you won't have access today to those coins. Either you would have lost them, or you would have sold them for very cheap (when it went 10X from what you paid for example)