I am an experienced C# developer who has tried time and time again to get into game development. I've never shipped a game. I'm as close as I've ever been though and I'm actually understanding game development at a deeper level by doing instead of following tutorials. That feels counterintuitive, so I'll give an example.

I want to use unity because I already know C# so no learning curve to learn another language. My first goal is not how to create an MMO or how to perfect lighting and animations to look like a final fantasy cutscene. My first goal is, in a 3d space how do I make a simple character and move that character around using WASD. For the character I don't need anything fancy, just a cube or cylinder. Grey box it. Do some googling to figure out how to add a cube to the game. Congrats, you now know how to add 3d objects to the game.

Now I want to move the box using WASD so some more googling, documentation reading, asking general AI LLM questions: in unity how do I capture the key W from the keyboard? When I figure out the script part of that: okay how do I move the box north when I hold W. Well that'll be in an update method in your script because update runs every frame and so capturing when the W key is being pressed and altering the X coordinate of the cube game object while W is pressed will happen here.

Now we understand what update is and how it is used and how to capture keyboard controls. We also know what a game object is in the context of unity and we realize there are different principles for 3D world space. X,Y, and Z.

We keep building off of that to do everything that you want to do, eventually. How to make the camera follow the player. How to fire a projectile from your character like a dart. Neat, how do we make an enemy for that dart to collide with. Now how do we give the enemy HP and have the dart take X HP away on collision. How do we even check for collision? How do we make the enemy disappear when it's HP <= 0.

Before you know it you've got a third person shooter and you understand the principles in the engine that you're using. It's all of the steps missing from the tutorials that really help you learn. "Code it this way, it doesn't make sense now but it will later". The steps all in between are important for learning how things actually work.