Different people learn in different ways, but personally I’ve had more success with the opposite approach, ie “top-down”.

As in, rather than learning in depth all the low level parts then finally putting it together at the end, start with a surface high-level understanding of a working prototype then expand into the details of how everything works inside.

In the case of ML, this could mean starting with a 5 line SciKit-learn prototype of a random forest model, seeing some working predictions, then expanding knowledge from there - what data is going in and what is coming out? What’s a classifier? What’s a decision tree? Etc