I have tried both approaches a fair amount, and realized that every time I try the cobbler approach I end up getting blocked on some major thing and thus having to rewrite everything because of some basic things that could have been avoided.

I feel like it's getting both better and worse now with docs getting better in general(no of times I end up on stackoverflow has gone down significantly), however a lot of times I end up on medium posts with a list of steps and absolutely zero reason why. Whenever I try cobbling from those articles, I end up very frustrated