I feel that, if you ever wanted to get back into it though, now's the time. Everything is so streamlined and like you said, there are people who've been using it since 1.8 that are amazing at showing exactly what you need to know.

I kinda figured out most of it by just messing around, but the Blender Guru guy does a great job of explaining modifier stacks and materials. Most of the models in this scene are only like 30-40 manually placed vertices lol. The rest of it is just done automatically by Catmull-Clark and Cycles