Contrary to what most people say, I found that having flown X-Plane for a year or so before flight training, always striving for reality, has given me a pretty good feel for how a real aircraft handles. This probably doesn’t translate for all planes and for everyone, but it sure helped me. With a good set of rudder pedals and even a mediocre stick, I can practice crosswind landings and sideslips and it helps me being more comfortable when doing it in real life. It needs to be a pretty accurate simulation for that, and judging that isn’t easy, and bad models can lead to bad habits, so I won’t recommend it in general.

The only way to really learn to fly is… to fly :)

That is mostly still true, although professional full-flight simulators used for airliner type-rating and recurrency training are probably good enough to teach you to fly without ever having been in a real aircraft. But those cost at least an order of magnitude more per hour than a light GA airplane, so it’s not cost-effective for ab-inito flight training.