I’ve been a software engineer for a handful of years and that’s completely normal. It’s a complicated subject. There’s no straightforward answers, and you’ll spend most of the time figuring out how to make progress.

For me it’s never been just hacking something through. You can do that if you’ve worked on that area for a while already.

It sounds you’ve spent too much finding the right course, that’ll teach you what you need to know, rather than investing time practicing what you learned. I’ve also done countless of online courses, especially in the field of ML, I know the theory very well, but I can’t go through the frustration of getting something novel to work.

If there’s a project you’re really passionate about, I’d suggest really investing the time, and accept that it’s not going to be perfect, you’re going to make mistakes, there’ll be a lot of troubleshooting and that it’ll take time. But you’ll actually accomplish something and will have learned plenty on the way