Why I Stopped Trying to Count "Exactly Right" and Started Subtracting

I've been working through coding problems that I can understand when reading solutions but struggle to solve on my own. This series is about breaking down the "why does this actually work" part. Not tutorials. Just honest breakdowns of where my thinking got stuck and what finally unstuck it. The problem that broke my brain LeetCode 795: Number of Subarrays with Bounded Maximum. You get an array of integers and a range [left, right] . Count how many contiguous subarrays have their maximum element