Highly recommend to anyone struggling with linear algebra to check out Linear Algebra Done Right, by Sheldon Axler. Do always keep in mind that some concepts are very verbose, but truly out of necessity. If you're talking about an N by N matrix, you're naturally going to have to distinguish N^2 different elements.

You can go very far without touching matrices, and actually find motivation on this abstract base before learning how it interops with matrices.

A little surprising to me this doesn’t come up the most! Excellent text, and look, you can get the 4th edition (2024) for free as a pdf at http://axler.net.