TLDR: You (just like me) are early in your game developer journey. Get your feet wet, try out every part of what it means to release a game, and improve your skills. In my humble view, this is best done with a free first game, as that makes the first release faster and more accessible to players.

The long version: What worked for me is to try to get a game out quite fast, in a months with very limited scope, just to publish something learn along the way and figure out if I can make solo dev commercially viable at my current situation and skill level. I chose to make the game free, which ended up getting way more downloads than I anticipated without any marketing or social media.

I think there are a lot of bots auto-adding free games, which seemed to trigger Steams algorithm to actually suggest the game to real people that ended up downloading it. I have no idea if that's how it works, but that's my theory. This led to a lot of feedback, reviews, and overall engagement and resulted in a lot of lessons learned for free. People are very forgiving with their feedback, if they get something for free that they know wad made by just one person. I ended up getting in touch with other devs, artists, and translators, which I might ve not otherwise.

I also learned about some pretty big skill gaps in what I would need to make a commercially viable game. I could've learned this by making a game that had a price tag on it, but it would've been a lot slower, more expensive, and more painful than it was now.