People with aphantasia aren't retards who can't mentally visualise and manipulate objects things in 3 dimensions, they can perceive the object and how it behaves without literally being able to see it. Artists can visualise and plan things out in their head even with aphantasia, and even blind artists with no visual ability are perfectly capable of understanding the layout, how to draw in perspective, etc. of their artwork. A lot of people actually hypothesise (for whatever reason, probably confirmation bias) that people with aphantasia are more intelligent on average due to their practice at thinking abstractly and relying on logic to visualise things, however there's no real evidence, and their is no evidence in the other direction either.
The metaphor I find most helpful is a computer with a graphical interface vs one running command line. When it comes to retrieving information and presenting it, both can have the same information, it's just presented differently on the screen
