As a self taught developer, I'm so thankful I first thought I wanted to be a designer. HTML and CSS made sense to me (the backend, even frontend js, forget it. I'd try to hack around it) and I sought deeper knowledge on the subject. Build systems and preprocessors were a gateway to command line tools and good organization skills.

Once I was thrown into full stack development, I at least had something to lean on while the backend programming caught up with the frontend. Then I started applying the things I learned programming backend applications to frontend applications (where do I keep all this state?). I think I spent a lot of time in the desert of despair wrt. certain types of programming but was never entirely there.

I think it's important to have something to feel confident in while you struggle.