It’s honestly not that hard, the language was made to be simple. The complexity associated with the language largely has to do with the legacy applications the language supports. If you look at a greenfield project (eg CHADstack (it’s a joke project, but pretty fun to get exposure to some esoteric stuff for a couple hours)) you’ll actually pick the language features up pretty quickly.
If you’re supporting windows anyway you should use their tooling. This isn’t controversial, MSVC is a good compiler supported by good developers. I find MSVC more reliable than MinGW on windows as well. I recommend maintaining a single CMake project so that you can switch between compilers and build tools.
Switch to an IDE that has clang-tidy. Enable as many warnings as you can stomach here https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/checks/list.html
You don’t have to be reading the standards doc to keep up with the new constructs. As long as you keep up with tooling, you should be getting warnings and recommendations that teach you about the new constructs.
Have you thought about ways to monetize your project? That’ll be a great to show off on your resume if you wanted a conventional job. Even implementing AdSense on your site will get some folks interested enough to interview you.
Imgui, because it makes dev/debug guis ridiculously straightforward and easy to create.