It's a steep learning curve, but because much of the community publishes their personal configs, I find it a lot simpler to browse public code repos with complete declarative examples to achieve a desired setup than it is to follow meandering tutorials that subtly gloss over steps or omit prerequisite assumptions and initial conditions.
There are also plenty of outcroppings and plateaus buttressing the learning cliff that one can comfortably camp at. Once you've got a working MVP to boot and play from, you can experiment and explore at your own pace, and just reach for escape hatches like dev containers, flatpacks or appomages when you don't feel like the juice is worth the squeeze just yet.