Here are my recommendations:
1. Traditional has the advantage for learning the physical skills and coordination of drawing because there is zero latency; no gadget beats a good pen on smooth drawing paper for making the result be exactly what you put into it, and not a sluggish, smoothed approximation. For learning grip specifically, I also consider fountain pens to be the best option because they demand a specific contact angle and awareness of nib direction; they resist wiggling the pen willy-nilly. An inexpensive fountain like any of Pilot's entry level(even the disposable Varsity pens) is fine for this.
2. The cheapest and simplest way to jump in with digital and really draw(vs using digital just for edits or leaning on the technical tools) is to use a capacitive stylus and draw on your phone with apps like Ibispaint X, Procreate and Sketchbook. Don't get just any stylus; Meko has a good mesh tip stylus design that has a marker feel. The disc tip feels more precise but I find that it gets dirty and loses contact more often.
3. If you get a tablet, the two features that really matter are that it uses EMR technology or a variant(which is true of all the major brands except, I think, Apple, which is also good because it's Apple) and whether or not it has a screen of some kind. There are small differences in precision between brands and generations of tech, but functionally, a tablet is a fancy mouse; it tracks movement and reads pressure, the rest is software magic. The screen mostly matters because of latency; if you are coloring, painting with small strokes and making selection edits it doesn't matter as much and you can enjoy better ergonomics, but if you are making precise freehand lines, being able to see your hand becomes essential. If the screen is large that's not necessarily good because it means more hand movement to access menus.
4. For learning observational drawing I suggest looking up Charles Bargue's plates, which are very old, still in use and a well-regarded course for practicing progressively more difficult drawing subjects. The techniques of observation come down to different ways of measuring proportion: sight-size, comparative measurement, and grid drawing. Each of those three has hundreds of video tutorials. If you work through a lot of material it'll become automatic to know "how" to study a drawing and copy it.
5. Everything else builds on the measuring skills of observational drawing. If you can observe shapes and reproduce them, you can then go on to observe patches of light and shadow as shapes and begin painting those; if you can break down the anatomy of a figure into a collection of shapes describing a pose and perspective, you can apply technical understanding of perspective and 3D forms to transform them into new poses. And so on.