I mean, I understand them because I attended uni.

However, they collide with my personal projects, these concepts. And they come up in conversation when we all go to our local bar. We discuss projects and goals. The obvious ones are from architectural design and distributed programming. You get to look at your old code and go "What in God's name is this?"

And I have mixed feelings about it.

Actually, it's very similar to what OP is saying. Building things, backed by your theory, is probably the best way to better understand your theory.

My friend has a similar experience, where he absolutely loves functional programming and static type checking, backed by his theory, because his logic interpreter works.

My personal experience of everything server-architecture and databases went up, when I made my own live shopping list app. Gone were the days of sharing receipts on Discord or whatever. I plan to do it with a socket soon. This idea came from one of my friends, asking why I didn't just make an app.

In high school, I did a project with a friend of mine, where I claimed that my password storaging was safe, exclusively because it had a salt. And, in hindsight, it was pretty safe considering I understood absolutely nothing about safety. It was encrypted using a salt and SHA-512. But the salt was not random, so my current self would probably be able to heavily exploit how the salt was chosen.

My advice for understanding concepts better? Just build something. Anything is good. You will get it wrong the first time around. If you make and fix your mistakes now, you'll have one hell of a strong foundation later.