Why the "gifted boy to trans girl" pipeline?

I'm sure many of you have seen all the memes describing trajectories from "promising straight-As student", to "burnout", to "trans catgirl", and variations along these lines.

Now, as an autistic cis guy who's been trying to recover from a burnout and who is starting to notice some weird stuff happening with my gender (basically, I'm so effeminate I keep having to disappoint handsome gay men whose gaydar seems faulty. And I spend a ton of time on this trans Reddit, for obvious cis reasons) [still cis tho, I swear!], I'm a bit worried I might be slowly making my way along that pipeline.

So, now, I have questions:

- First and foremost: Why is there that pipeline in the first place? Like, I can sort of build ad hoc explanations if I want to, about how something something being trans makes you burn out, but at first glance, "autistic burnout" just doesn't seem like it should have anything to do with anybody's gender?
- Am I spending way too much time on trans Reddit because it's full of cool autistic burned-out nerds, or for [ahem] less cis reasons? How can I tell? Am I fooling myself into believing I might be trans just to fit in with the other burned-out nerds, or not?
- In your experience, does it work? Like, you're burned out, then you turn into a catgirl, are you not burned out anymore? (In addition to being written in the most cliché'd way possible, this question might be a little biased by the fact that I'm basically asking a sub full of trans people whether transitioning made them feel better. But anyway...)
- Generally, what do you think about that pipeline? Does it even exist? (the posts that mention it seem to get a ton of responses of people who recognise themselves in it, but ultimately I'm still asking you a ton of questions about a meme).