How to balance "just treat women like people" advice with actually making a move?

So most modern advice on online dating is basically, "If you just treat women like people, everything else will fall into place", but that hasn't really been my experience. Not in any kind of misogynistic, "why do these women always put me in the friend zone", but basically the opposite.

Most of the time I'll start out interested in someone, just treat them like a human being, build a genuine friendship and write it off as "well we're just really good friends, if she was interested it would be obvious", completely let go of any romantic feelings and treat it as strictly platonic, and then eventually down the line usually a year or two later it randomly comes up in conversation that they say "I actually had a crush on you but you never made a move so I just thought you weren't interested" (usually when they get a new boyfriend or I'm dating someone else). Actually, the few times I've thought a woman I was friends with was clearly flirty and interested, it always ended with "no, I'm not interested, we're just friends, you just misread the situation", which makes it even more confusing.

Honestly, every woman I've dated has pretty much pursued me off the bat or made it obvious immediately that they were interested, so there was never any "friend phase" (and by "made it obvious," I mean usually, if not telling me directly, telling a mutual friend). Beyond that, I clearly have no idea how to read flirty vs friendly signals, so how do I get better at that and know when to actually make a move?