Since the author's already responded, this might be redundant, but perhaps expanding the example at
https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang#case-study might be a helpful look at a running example of Dhall. I feel like I've seen multiple people completely skip over and not realize there was already an example in the README as opposed to just the detailed reference docs.
Perhaps you're looking for something with even more features and applicability (e.g. an example of a Kubernetes config as Dhall's author points out), but hopefully that example gives at least a self-contained example of how to gradually start using Dhall.