For similar animations for purely mechanical devices.

http://507movements.com/

and

King Mechanical https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq5j3ecL5WohYKF7RV_qUGg

Both are great, I suspect I'm going to sink countless hours into them.

What are some resources one can check out to start increasing their understanding of these, starting from roughly zero?

Your best bet is college textbooks. This one is good: http://epp.etf.rs/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Fitzgerald_E...

Less on machines on more on basic concepts, may I recommend a physics site that is spiritually related to this website, in that it is also clear, simple, and in many ways a work of passion for teaching? http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/emcon.html#emcon

Electric Motors and Drives[0] is very good. Not very mathematical, and gives a lot of intuition. If you understand basic electronics and can do arithmetic you can follow most of the book. Some parts are harder than others but if you keep going it will eventually make sense.

Edit: I took a look at some of the other books people recommended and they seem more advanced, this book is easier than them and probably better for someone without an EE background. I am not sure how to best learn electronics (I learned from The Art of Electronics, but that is probably not the easiest way to learn, and probably overkill for just learning how motors work.)

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Electric-Motors-Drives-Fundamentals-A...

Starting from roughly zero, I'd recommend this page and its neighbours:

http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Workshop/advice/coils/force.html

https://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Technology-H-Cotton-ebook/... an older edition of this was my textbook back in the day. You can only understand motors with this book. You'll also need a textbook on power electronics to learn how to supply them electricity. Maybe a textbook on control systems to learn how to control them.

Electric Machinery Fundamentals Stephen J. Chapman

This was the book we used in undergraduate, It was quite readable as I remember.

for ac machines, langsdorf.

I saw a recommendation for the Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz on here a while ago.

It doesn't involve electric machinery, not even basic magnetics.

I wish I understood this stuff more; it seems like there is probably much wealth of knowledge in electrical engineering that I wouldn't learn anything remotely similar to in other fields of study

I think any subject will be much deeper than your current superficial language of it is once you dive into it; the STEM fields are one of course, but otoh there's for example my girlfriend who is / was a gardener, which is something many people pull their noses up at because it's just menial work involving a shovel and a lawnmower right? Except it's not, you get to deal with the wonderful worlds of soil composition, soil ecosystems, drainage / hydraulics, microbiology, entomology, lots of Latin, geometry and measurements, and in her case, running a business as well so financial administration and tax laws and the like.

TL;DR I think you vastly underestimate other fields of study because you've never looked into or considered them. I get that you're in awe of this particular page and want to express it, but be aware that you kinda come across as dismissive of everything that isn't electrical engineering or your own particular field of study.

Sometimes it's for stupid reasons too. I was trained as a mechanical engineer before getting into software and I thought data structures wouldnt be interesting because data didn't seem interesting. Boy was I wrong.

It's sometimes interesting to see how many people repeat things like "computers only see 1s and 0s" and at some point after working through all kinds of topics between CPU pipelines, data compression etc. one can (re)discover this truth from the other side, realising how amazing it is that all this knowledge and structure can be encoded in just 1s and 0s.

And I'm sure other fields have this too, where to the outside it's "just atoms and molecules" and then the scientist chuckles and says "indeed".

Power engineering is vast. Machinery, generation/transmission/distribution, high voltage are the main topics. They're very much intertwined with each other so maybe it's pointless to divide it into topics. Of course it's still part of the broader electrical engineering subject.