A couple friends of mine who have autism seem to have a deeper understanding of their emotions and thought processes than I do, and the patients I’ve met with ASD as a nurse also have better insight in terms of their mental health

Interesting. I consider myself probably autistic, but I feel like I'm a lot more disconnected from my emotions than average. Granted, I think that's largely because of ADHD and dysphoria that I was trying to hide from myself by avoiding being alone with just my thoughts; always doing something else, even if just listening to music to avoid it, and dealing with dissociation.

Whether that’s cause all of the above have done a lot of therapy though

Could also be a difference. I never have (outside a court-ordered one during parent's divorce, but that was largely about figuring out custody and I had no interest in engaging with her).

I don’t think people with autism are necessarily ignorant of social norms

I think often social norms are often perceived as more arbitrary rules to be learned and something to follow if there is fear of social punishment for violating the norms rather than any sort of attachment to the norms themselves. Whereas other people will sometimes get hung up on the norms themselves.

Also, there can be significant misunderstandings. Like, assuming people who perform their gender are making fun of gender because we always saw gender as a joke and didn't realize other people didn't see it that way. So, technically not completely ignorant that the social norm of gender exists, but not much better.

It can lead to confusion about whether something is just an arbitrary social norm or an actual thing. Throughout middle school, I wondered if sexual attraction was just made up and people pretended to experience it because it was socially expected of them; I considered it more likely that people actually experienced it, but couldn't rule it out as a legitimate possibility, especially since dating at that age largely does seem to be the result of people trying to follow social norms rather than a genuine interest in dating.