I think the biggest hump to get over for software engineers is that the physical world doesn't have the same kind of abstractions because of the inconvenient realities of real materials. Software engineers have the luxury of playing around in purely constructed environments where a lot of the complexity is accidental complexity (like CSS frameworks or how email delivery is a mess due to long legacy) but there's some pure abstraction lurking around in the background crowded by our imperfections as a species. A lot of software engineers pride themselves on the ability to glean out that hidden, pure abstraction.

You get smacked in the face over and over again moving into physical that the real world just doesn't work that way. You can take something as simple as a flat sheet of metal and there's a half dozen different processes to make it (hot roll, cold roll, cast, milled etc.) that each have different properties but there's nothing abstract underlying it.

Here's what I suggest you go: Buy two big totes and then go to a second hand store and buy an arrangement of the most random items ever (eg: a clock radio, a fork, a teapot, a book, a tv, a sweater etc). Break each item down into constituent components and put them all in Tote A.

Pick something random from Tote A that you're curious about and the hard bit is actually finding the noun of what the manufacturing process is (ie: injection moulding, Surface Mount Pick & Place etc.) to have made that thing.

The thing I really like after that is to go to youtube and find companies trying to sell machines/services using youtube as sales collateral (random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uet6TNtUXI). They're talking about their process in the terms the customer cares about and it helps you get into the mindset of the customer about what's important in this manufacturing process.

Eventually, as stuff moves from Tote A to Tote B, get a 3rd Tote and move stuff to Tote C when you understand the upstream process as well. If you do this often enough, eventually you start seeing a "grammar" of the physical world. You can look at a thing and understand how it was probably built and why certain choices were made to accomodate the realities that not every single manufacturing process is as easy to pull off (vs in software, you delete one library and replace it with another and you don't really think about it) and you just need to know these things to make anything.

You can specialize down at any point in this process and inevitably will but I think the fascinating thing about starting general is that you eventually just start doing a mental teardown of any engineered product you encounter in the world and builds into a lifelong practice. You instantly spot the others who share the practice via all their little tells in the world and you find a secret club of people where membership is via geeking out about physical design.