Having edited for several years now has certainly led me to get philosophical about the differences between reading for the sake of reading and reading with the Editor Hat on. "Said" would definitely be less visible to me if I wasn't editing. I've also learned I'm not a great "continuity editor", or whatever the term for that would be, for larger works, because I'm balancing this with my 'real' job, so there's only so much time I can commit to it, meaning I'm slow and my memory for stuff I read weeks or months earlier isn't so great, and I don't desire (and haven't been asked) to keep a tracking spreadsheet. But also this story takes place in a fictional world, and while the author has created maps (and even star charts!), trying to keep track of that stuff on my own would drive me a little bonkers, especially since the passage of time is sometimes ambiguous.
I actually landed my first major editing gig in part because I was already beta reading voluntarily, and when I apologized to the author for the fact that I was, in my mind, falling inexcusably behind, he asked me what I thought of what I'd read so far and I told him something to the effect of, "I really like the story you're telling, and I'd definitely recommend this to other people...but there are enough mechanical issues...not a ton, but enough...that I'd feel obligated to mention that to anyone I was recommending the book to." I also mentioned that I was struggling a bit because my Editor Brain kept making me want to say something about those even as I knew that was out of scope for a Beta Reader, and he asked me whether I'd be open to the possibility of editing for him (he'd had a prior editor who he'd released in part because she explicitly ignored one of the significant points of his Manual of Style), and the ball kept rolling from there.
