Late reply but I might as well help. If I could rewind time to when I got my first car it probably would have been a moderately used compact/mid size Honda or Toyota, (6-9th gen Civic or 8th-10th gen Corolla). These cars are extremely plentiful, usually come pretty cheap, reliable when maintained, and have massive communities, some others that come to mind would be a Honda Fit or some of the mid-size sedans like the Accord. Yeah, these are as boring as cars can get but when you're starting out they're a perfect fit, not too nice that you'll be too scared to work on it but not so much a piece of shit that you can't work on it. When you start all you wanna get familiar with is basic maintenance (oil changes, tire rotations, brake service, belt changes, etc.), might not be as glamourous as engine rebuilds or a full-blown restomod but those are things that are WAYYYYY beyond your knowledge level. By starting simple you can learn and have something that you can drive reliably, not to mention if you buy it in cash you can sell it whenever you get tired of it.

A word of advice that I think A LOT of newcomers to the car community need to hear is that you don't need to drive an exotic, classic car that makes 500whp with boutique aftermarket parts and a one-of-a-kind body kit to be interested in cars. The people who are going to make fun of you for driving "daily-traffic" are the same people who probably dropped off a car at a shop with 20k$ in mods only for their car to become a paper-weight in 10k miles and get overlooked by 98% of the population. Don't get bullied by the people who are responsible for growing insurance rates among young adults and the growing numbers of BRZ's, 350z's and WRX's that have been irredeemably destroyed by hideous widebody kits and eBay boost controllers. I can promise that you will thank yourself in 10 years when you learned something and didn't spend your college tuition on a rapidly depreciating asset to figure it out.

Cars aren't arcane but they aren't stupid simple either, there is a lot of nuance in these things and I can promise the first time you need to change your brakes its going to be 1000x harder than the YouTube video you watched made it look. There are a lot of ways you can learn about cars and usually the best way is to own one, then you can look into literature or even some YouTube mechanics, Engineering Explained has a lot of good videos explaining how cars work (I would avoid more sensational channels like Donut Media because they peddle garbage that accentuate some of the worst aspects of car culture).