My succinct take on this is that you can use a flight sim to learn about flying, but you can't use a flight sim to learn to fly.
It's a very subtle difference that I didn't grasp until doing procedure flying like navigation or flight by sole reference to instruments.
IMO the only thing a flight simulator does for a pre-solo pilot is reduce the effort needed in ground school a bit, because you already know how some things work. Flight instruments is an obvious one, already raised.