I've learned about group theory and isomorphisms, I've looked into how the incompleteness theorems work in depth in formal education.

All that made me do was run away from math for a while because everything is overwhelming, it feels like learning civil engineering by looking at a giant 18th century cathedral, having to learn every part of how to build it, and then building it yourself, and then moving on to more and more buildings until you can derive how to build a skyscraper by yourself.

Maybe I'm ready to get back into heavy math and should read the book, idk. Maybe I missed the forest for the trees that I've studied, so I missed out on some beauty by trying to analyze how every single tree works.

As a 40 something successful engineer who read GEB in my early 20's, calling it the most "influential" of my life would be telling on myself. It's a fine book, I'd absolutely encourage people from their mid-teens to their mid 20's to read it. I really enjoyed the examination of Bach's fugues in comparison with other mathematical concepts. But it's just not that profound. There isn't a lot of substance in the book, and much like Ender's Game, another great book, you should recognize it's limitations.

If you want a profound book that has a lot of hard math mixed with easy to understand concepts, I'd suggest Applied Cryptography, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119183471, or The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives, https://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Powder-Explosives-Tenney-Davis/dp/0913022004