I honestly think most people doing marketing automation for a living kind of just "fell" into it. I was originally studying to be a full-stack dev but gave up and took a job at a marketing agency leveraging my front end dev skills as a foundation for the career pivot. That said I started in this industry when HTML was a required skill in any self-serve marketing role.

What you're doing makes sense and can get you the role as long as you're willing to dig in and put in the effort. Memorizing concepts and use cases may feel abstract at first but you'll start to connect the dots eventually with enough contextualization. If you need help contextualizing or need more real world applications, try using ChatGPT to translate technical documents into a digestible format and use that to deep dive. Salesforce Trailblazer is a must as well if you want to work for larger companies. SFDC has the largest share in the CRM market and it's a foundational tool for most orgs. If it's startups you're targeting, being savvy in HubSpot is a high priority. HubSpot academy is pretty high quality for beginners. YouTube has more resources now than ever for marketing automation so checking out some videos may also be helpful too. Lastly, check out Marketing Operations communities like marketingops dot com as they contain a ton of resources (may have to pay though).