Yeah, I also did electronic kits as a kid, and both learned how to read a diagram thanks to them, but never understood what individual parts did in any circuit.

I “get” I=V/R (I mean not really… I know it exists), but how to go from there to understanding what each capacitor is doing in the simplest of fm circuits?

Is each component doing the equivalent of non-trivial real-time signal processing? How to visualize / think about it?