Hi, welcome! here’s a bit of background as to why this restriction is in place.
If you don’t mind, please do go ahead and use iNaturalist a bit more first.
There are a few reasons we’re doing this, but first and foremost is to emphasize that iNat is about observations and identifications. Everything else is secondary, if not tertiary, and folks who want to use iNat’s other features should always understand the iNat experience from the perspective of an observer and/or an identifier. We see a lot of people signing up for iNat and trying to make a project right off the bat, which often leads to some confusion on the project creator’s part about the behavior of their participants or what all the various settings mean. I would have preferred to apply this restriction to collection and umbrella projects as well, but that seemed to get a lot of pushback . Places have similar problems, largely because of people creating place records for places that already exist.
There are also some technical reasons for doing this, particularly regarding places. Making new places that encompass lots of observations kicks off automated background jobs that can take a really, really long time, and sometimes that affects site performance for everyone. One could argue that no one should have the ability to do this, but we feel pretty strongly that new users definitely should not be able to do this.
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/24731-new-requirements-to-sending-messages-making-projects-and-making-places