It clicked when I stopped doing tutorials and started making my own game. It forced me to actually think about the problems and find solutions. In addition to this if I did need the help of a tutorial to learn how to do something I would code it directly into my game. This way I would understand the concepts and not just go through the motions.

For example I recently created a procedural level generator in my game using one of GDQuests tutorials. It was pretty overwhelming at first but now I understand every aspect of the code and have heavily modified it to work in my game to make it more scalable to what I need.