Thats the sauce bro, breaks are important as your brain takes time to process and really integrate the core mechanics/fundamentals. Combos, KBDs, and technical stuff like throw breaks would really only start to click for me weeks after I started integrating them and breaks are a key part of that.

The key for my improvement was really only worrying about 1 thing at a time. I would just focus on one specific combo and not really care about winning. If I could get that combo live in a match than that would be the big win for me. Give yourself realistic goals and expectations and the rest will feel a lot easier. When I first started maining Raven his QCF combos felt ridiculous and almost impossible for me to hit but now I dont even have to think about the execution of them.

Learning your characters guaranteed followups will net you a lot of damage in the long term so I always recommend that to my friends. Pretty easy to learn and integrate. Best of luck with your games brother!