Welcome earthechoes - your story reminded me of my own - as I joined OGS shortly after watching Michael Redmond commenting on the Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo games in 2016. Like countless generations of Go players before me, I then stumbled forward, hitting my head against any number of brick walls until I started teasing out little clues and bits of understanding on my own.
I have found it helpful to think of Go through the metaphor of learning a martial art with a belt/rank system. So, if you start a kung fu class as a white belt, you’re going to be taught some fundamentals/basics and then - once you have a good handle on those - you augment them with other skills and techniques that build on those foundations, allowing you to progress from one stage to the next.
Because of this, trying to spar with more experienced students may become frustrating because they understand so many more techniques than you do. Not only will you “lose” but you may have a difficult time understanding WHY and HOW it happened, and not be able to apply any learning to doing something differently next time.
As such, I strongly encourage you to seek out games against opponents that will be somewhat close to your rank and level (i.e. 20-25 kyu players) - or alternately - use the OGS forum to ask for more advanced players to offer you teaching games, so you can benefit from their experience.
Lastly, I’ve been working on a (long) series of articles that tries to shorten that period of confusion by introducing beginners to some fundamental concepts and elements of the game - something that I felt was sorely missing when I first began learning. If you start at this first article here, you should be able to find links to the subsequent articles at the bottom of each previous one.
Good luck!