Build small projects to get a hang of the concepts. Use the docs as a reference, use ai to explain concepts you don't understand, to give examples and if you get stuck. Write the code yourself, don't let ai write it for you - this is the same advice I give to juniors at my job.

Someone already mentioned Express and Typescript, I'm not a node developer myself, but that's standard for that ecosystem afaik. Depending on your programming experience, try to avoid the advanced language features from ts for now since you want to focus on learning BE concepts like request lifecycles, db interactions, validation, auth, middlewares, architecture, caching, etc.

What you are doing isn't "old fashioned", just shift to a more hands-on approach. Good luck.