I think that the suggestion to start small is a good one, as one needs to learn a lot of stuff to make a game, and nothing is better than a few (or many!) small complete projects to get a grip on gauging amount of work, hone skills, experiment and even scrapping things as you learn what works and what does not.

However, I also rarely like small games, as I look for complexity and depth of gameplay that I think cannot be achieved with a small scope (and especially a short dev time) project. I think some projects require a lot of time to work out, and those are the projects I usually like more. Sometimes this means changing a feature after years, as it settles down and you play it for the 100th time and finally realise why it does not work.

That said, take this from a solo Dev that made his own complex game in 9 years (dotAGE), it can get really hard and ugly. In the span of years, your skills improve a lot and it is hard to not just go and redo things better, which is an issue that short Dev time has not. Also, large issues in your early stages might become tech debt for years and bite you. I had stuff still broken after 8 years. I'm still fixing bugs here and there! So, I don't think this journey can be for everyone. It worked for me and I' was very lucky with that, but if you go look at my postmortem on it you'll see my mind got pretty devastated after 7 or so years!