I'm not surprised I undersell it. I try to take a few months to a year's break from programming once a decade or so, when I can, both for the sake of coming back with fresh eyes and because anything gets miserable if you do it hard enough for long enough. This seemed like a good time. So though I've installed and set up gptel and chatted enough over some Elisp to see that it's functional with local models, I haven't as yet actually used it in a serious way.

On that note, I'm not much in the Emacs blog/creator scene or ecosystem this decade, either. Do you know any good topical resources that might fit well with time spent mostly away from keys? I realize I may be asking quite a lot.

I don't follow that scene much, either, but I do subscribe to https://www.masteringemacs.org/ which has good roundups when new major versions come out. I also have several open tabs from there about various libraries I need to fold into my own emacs configuration.