Agreed. For many, myself included, receiving praise for an outcome gets internalized as setting that outcome as the minimum bar. It applies more pressure. For some, they hear that the outcome is valuable and punish themselves psychologically for not achieving it sooner. For some, it's even more complicated than that.
A few years ago, I was managing the most impactful engineer I've ever been around (and I've seen a lot great engineers in my 30+ year career that included stints at several startups including my own, going through a a pretty big IPO, working at a FAANG as it came to dominate it's area, etc.). It was her first job and the team was stacked with high performers. We were directly responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. Three weeks into her career, everybody on the team was going to her when they couldn't figure things out. Just a phenomenal mind with a capacity for dealing with technical complexity and finding business value that I would have previously thought impossible. Of course that led to a lot of praise from me and everyone else. Every time I praised her for an outcome, she withdrew further, eventually getting to the point that she wouldn't say anything in one-on-ones other than short answers to direct questions. A few months in, the CEO (without telling any of us beforehand) used a slide from one of her design review presentations to inspire the company with the kinds of technical->business wins we were now achieving as a company - it devastated her, making her want to change careers. A month later, she tried to reject a significant salary increase.
Nine months in, she made (and corrected) a minor technical mistake. I mentioned it to her in our next one-on-one. As I did, she leaned forward and her eyes got big. She peppered me with questions until she understood my perspective on it from every angle. The more I spoke about it, the more she perked up. After seeing this response, I decided to try to find deeper "criticisms" to bring up with her. She was so good that it was HARD to find anything at all. Eventually I thought of what level she'd be at in ten years and framed things as "here are skills you have that you're not fully exploiting to be as impactful as you could be." It instantly turned our interactions inside out. She went from zero trust in me as her manager to complete trust in me as a life mentor in ~30 minutes.
Later I asked her why that worked and she said it was one of the few times in her life that she thought someone understood her faults and still valued her. It's just what you're saying about letting people know you see them and what they're doing, not just the outcomes they are a part of and how it affects you. I'm lucky to have learned so much about engineering, management, and life from my interactions with her.
One of my heroes, Fred Rogers, was very good at this 50+ years ago, saying things like "I like you just the way you are."