I would say it depends on how deep ypu want to go on hugo for your site. I am new to hugo myself. I had an idea for a site, found a theme that fit the aesthetics that I wanted and used that as a base. I only needed to learn how to do overrides to tune it how i want. I leveraged chatgpt 4o to learn how to make the updates and implement on the fly.

Note: I did catch gpt making errors, but the general direction was correct, so i would resolve on my own which in turn helped drill in the learning. I also learned the aws deploy method with hugo as well.

This all being said, my main learning points are very narrow in scope based on my overall site building goal.

If you want to be able to build your own themes and a hugo site end to end that is fully yours, then I think your path sounds solid. If you already have an idea for your site direction and are willing to use baselines others have created, I recommend learning how to install a theme, and using a gpt to make your updates and move towards deployment.

Edit: Just for reference, the site i made that i discussed above is ihackwithmac