About time: Setting up ctags for Vim and Git

I've been a vim user for decades, a git user for years, but somehow I never got around to setting up ctags - watching my colleagues jump from function call to function definition was one of the few things that made me envious about VSCode.

I decided to set up ctags at last. Like so many things on the Internet, a lot of information was out of date and/or assumed you already knew what you were doing. I struggled more with a few really simple things (like how to tell vim where to find my tags files, since I'd never used them) than the more complex things (which weren't that complex, tbh), with a few detours caused by out-of-date documentation meeting my ignorance head-on.

So, FWIW, my overview of the process, with, I hope, getting-started information missing from other sources.