I've never made a chart in my life. Does this line I drew mean anything?
I would call it the upper resistance limit of a downtrend. That means that if price goes above that line, either the downtrend is recalibrating to a shallower slope, or it is reversing into a new uptrend (or resuming the overall uptrend which dominates a longer timeline). If it punches above but sinks back below, it's a false breakout. If it continues to punch above, and a downward line of shallower slope coincides with multiple tops, it has recalibrated.
You can use historical data to estimate the relative probabilities of these scenarios, but they may or may not vary with other environmental factors.
I expected to be told that I would need another line somewhere. Doesn't a "channel" have to form somewhere to make this valid?
So it's just a line connecting tops. Most of what I said about it above is basically a tautology. There's really nothing about it which can be invalid. It's when you start adding interpretation and projecting future moves or continuation patterns that it gets interesting. The line you drew can't really be made into a channel bound, because it extends over a time frame in which the candles are filling a triangle. If you were to do the same on a chart with time quanta in the 15-min to 4-hour range, you could make an uptrending channel from 11 March 00:00 GMT to now, by drawing parallel lines which encompass the wicks of all the candles, like the gray band here:
The main thing that is useful for is making clear when the trend the channel describes is over. Some things are very trendy. Some things less so. When something gets trendy, you want to go with the trend. When the trend ends you want unambiguous information to that effect. The channel helps make it clear. The channel is not perfect and you have to use other factors to decide if it's good to bet on staying inside the channel, or on returning to it from a spiking excursion, but at least it defines a region you can talk about with clarity.
I think there's more than one way to do effective TA. TA itself is highly varied, with a myriad of traditional and novel "evidence-based" metrics and signals which can be combined in an explosion of different ways. The main thing it does is focus your mind on what information you can extract from the chart. Statistical evidence allows you to make many useful inferences about what is likely to happen next, but almost nobody actually does the math. Most people just practice, and rely on their neocortex to do the math for them. I suspect the few rigorous statisticians do better on average than the other kind, but even then some people get the knack and some don't.