> Just using them doesn't really work because by myself I'd never discover most of the features and keybindings.

You could try thinking of which things feel tedious in Vim, and look up known ways to do it. It's rare that you come across a situation that can't be dealt with using a keybinding or plugin. But sometimes you just can't know beforehand what to look for, you likely won't learn features in the optimal order because there's just so much. Guides and tips on the internet come from people with very different workflows.

I'll just add a few things that might be useful to you, because they took me FAR too long to discover:

    - * and # search the word under the cursor
    - { and } lets you jump across paragraphs
    - set clipboard=unnamedplus makes y, d, c, p use the system clipboard
    - ci( to replace everything inside a pair of parentheses. Same works for [, {, <, ", ' etc. and other operations
    - W and B are like w and b but always jump to the next whitespace