I'm not a natural mathematician (emphatically not!) and pretty much every attempt I've made to wrap my head around Category Theory has foundered on an onslaught of formalism by paragraph 2.

To be clear, I'm not knoocking that: for those who can and do grok things from that sort of treatment, all power to your elbow (and no small amount of admiration).

But it's not how my brain works. I need an intuitive understanding first: exemplars, informal pictures, whatever. I can only start unscrambling the formalism once I have the intuition.

The author's introductory blog post is a great example [0]. It's without doubt the best "bootstrap" I've come across - where "best" means "most understanable to me". I really admire people who can take abstract/complex subject matters and lay them out in a clear and accessible way for the layperson. Tai-Danae Bradley definitely fits in that Category (dubious pun intended!).

[0]: https://www.math3ma.com/blog/what-is-category-theory-anyway

EDIT: fixed typo