I love Blender. After years of using it I am a basic user as I only use it for 3D printed models.

But Blender is just hard to get into. It's not just the updates, though they may not help.

What helped me most was setting aside the time to do a series of ~3 minute videos going back to the absolute basics.

IE how to: rearrange your workspace, use viewport, vertices-edges-faces, transforms-Grab, Rotate, Scale. And more.

AND THEN learning all the keyboard shortcut keys for them.

Blender is so much easier once you learn the common keyboard shortcuts that YOU use all the time. So take those notes.

Bit of exploration of the Blender documentation, which is fantastic but probably 99% used by the automated cognitive tools you asked a query of.

After THAT, you watch/do the tutorials to build basic donut/sword/gadget whatever of interest.

Then you are on your own to do what you want and then the inevitable forum/AI queries about specifics to try to solve the issue you are having.

In my early days, I spent over a week making a game model plane into something I could print. Now I understand the concepts and a few blender tools, it might take me 30 minutes.

Easy? No. It does require a concerted effort. It's not something you just "pick up on the side" like basic photo edits.

But damn, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities...