Oh wow, great read... I wish I had seen that earlier. Thanks for sharing! To elaborate, the rabbit hole I remember going down was something like googling "how to center css", then after being confused by a number of horrible incantations, arrived at flexbox then CSS grid, which was slightly less confusing, and then I took some time to really study the basics/fundamentals.

It also doesn't help that so many websites, even personal sites/portfolios these days, have so much markup goop and cruft that makes it quite hard to learn by example :(