I recently went down the path of learning it. Even with 6 years of experience using Docker and ~10 years of general deployment / Linux / sysadmin'y experience it took something like 180 hours of no screwing around time to get to the point where I was comfortable putting up a proof of concept production cluster.
Proof of concept in this case means having the cluster up and running to manage multiple services, hooking up multiple external hostnames with external-dns and an AWS Load Balancer controller (I am using EKS). It also involved handling things like running database migrations in a robust way and toying around with nice to haves like preview environments for all PRs. It didn't serve any live customer facing traffic but all of the pieces were there to do it.
The provisioning and managing of the cluster was all adhoc with a mish mash of Bash scripts, eksctl, kubectl and Helm commands. Now I'm transitioning all of that to use Terraform to set up the cluster and every change to the cluster happens through git using ArgoCD to monitor the repo. I'm really happy with the direction things are going. There's no way I could have started here tho, it would have been too many new things to take in at once without knowing the fundamentals.
Long story short, don't try to rush things and skip ahead. It's going to be really important to learn the basics of Kubernetes before trying to automate everything with best practices. I spent a ton of time reading the docs while experimenting with a cluster along with reading hundreds of blog posts and skimming YouTube videos. Every step of the way involved applying what I was learning to a real project and interacting with the cluster in some way.
90% of it was able to be learned with a local cluster running on your dev box.