Confirmations Aren't a Progress Bar
The misunderstanding
Most people read confirmations as progress. Three of five, six of ten, like something is travelling and the number says how far it's got.
Nothing's travelling. A confirmed transaction is already in a block, already recorded. The count is measuring something completely different — how much work someone would have to redo to reverse it.
Why that matters
Once you see it as a cost measure rather than a distance measure, everything else makes sense.
A transaction with one confirmation sits in a block that could still be displaced by a longer competing chain. Unlikely, not impossible. Each block stacked on top makes reorganising deep enough to undo it more expensive, until it stops being worth attempting.
An exchange sending your payout is committing real funds against your deposit. If your deposit reversed after they'd paid out, that money is gone. Waiting is what makes that attack pointless.
Why the number differs per asset
A confirmation on a fast-block chain represents far less accumulated work than one on a slow-block chain. Requiring the same count everywhere would mean wildly different actual security.
So it's calibrated per asset to reach comparable finality, which is why the real-world wait varies a lot between assets even when the numbers look similar.
Where the delay actually comes from
Two things. Your fee decides whether you get into a block at all — confirmation one doesn't exist until you're included. Block interval and congestion decide the pace after that.
Only the fee is in your control.
The diagnostic
Zero confirmations means you haven't been included yet. That's a fee problem and possibly fixable.
Some confirmations means it's working and the wait is finite.