I think this is accurate.
For me the recording learning curve has been about:
- Paying attention on how I enunciate
- Making sure I’m on Windows (Linux adds a weird noise to my microphone in Firefox)
- Making sure no one around me is making any noise
- Using keyboard shortcuts because my microphone captures the clicks of my mouse
And that is it. And even if you don’t care about it, odds are the recordings are good enough anyway.
But for listening, I agree with your comment. The website experience just throws you into validation without any help. And you hear audios with clips, with hums, with very low volume, different accents, etc. Personally sometimes I’m not sure if by saying “Yes” I may be making the system worse! And what if I say “No” and I throw away a valid volunteered effort! And the answer is to go to a Discourse forum and look for an appropriate thread that answers your questions. For a non-technical user, I think this is asking too much.
And even then sometimes the FAQs don’t help that much. In my case, I validate Spanish and the Spanish FAQ says you should say “No” to audios that skip the /s/ at the end of words. In my accent, it’s common to skip /s/ at the end of words, especially within some less economically privileged groups (Wikipedia puts it as “less educated” and I don’t really like that idea). So by rejecting audios without /s/ we’re making a system that leaves out the people that are already left out.
Anyway, it’s a complex issue and to be clear I don’t mean to belittle the efforts of a lot of people that created it as it is today. I think it’s a great project and that’s why I contribute 
Back on topic, living in quarantine with other people means I have fewer moments when I can be in silence and I won’t bother others. And validating-wise… well, not sure about other languages but in Spanish the top 3 people have so many more clips than the rest, that you hear them all the time. The first person in particular has 40k clips and the second has 24k clips, so the first person appears very often when validating. And either he has this really annoying and loud background “hummmmmm”, or his volume is really low. Sometimes I stop because I really don’t want to listen to him anymore lol.