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I'm not sure what definition you're referring to, but I don't see any reason why visualisation is necessary.
By analogy, I used to have a friend who was born with no sense of smell. This also greatly impacted his sense of taste. Despite this, he was an excellent chef. I once asked him about this apparent contradiction and he explained that because he knew this was something he lacked (it was discovered when he was a teenager), he had put extra work into learning how. He was very reliant on recipes at the beginning, because that was more formulaic and easier to iteratively improve. He most struggled with fresh ingredients that require some level of dynamic response from the cook (onions become stronger tasting as they get older, for example), but he said he'd gotten pretty good at gauging this through other means, like texture or colour or vegetables, and finding other ways of avoiding that problem (such as using tinned tomatoes, for consistency).
I found it fascinating that his deficits in taste/smell actually led to him being an above average cook due to him targeting it for improvement— I met him at university, where many of my peers were useless at cooking for themselves at first. To this, he commented that it wasn't just the extra effort, but the very manner in which he practiced; obviously he couldn't rely on himself to test how well he'd done, so he had to recruit friends and family to help give feedback, which meant he was exposed to a wide variety of preferences and ways of understanding flavour. He also highlighted that the sampling bias in my surprise — that all the times that he had cooked for me were things he had loads of experience cooking with and so he could work from knowledge about what works. Most people who had as much cooking skill and experience as he had would be way more able to experiment with new ingredients or cuisines, whereas my friend had to stick to what he knew worked.
I wonder whether aphantasic authors might feel similar to my friend — like they're operating from recipe books, relying on formulae and methods that they know work.