By finding the two contact points and connecting them with the cue, there is no need to remember an offset from center.
A simple parallel shift to center ball takes you there.
Learning to hit a target with the front of the cue ball rather than replacing that idea with a 2D rendered fraction or anything other than the real target, is looking for a way around the work needed to become comfortable with that skill.
I was lucky, starting on a snooker table, my aiming task, while learning, was to hit the end of paper matches set at right angles to the rail and just peeking over the edge.
Hitting those match heads from various angles helped develop a real connection between the cue and the front of the ball.
That connection pays dividends every time I’m shooting over a ball or from off the rail.
I can’t see the face of the ball in those cases but don’t need to, when I learned to make contact with the actual part of the ball that needs to make contact.
There is no abstraction in that process.
