My own journey has been quite different.

When I was building my kernel in my late teens, I first wrote the bootloader by hand on paper in assembly language. I then referenced the x86 manual for the instruction set and converted my assembly code into the equivalent hexadecimal machine code values of the x86 machine instructions, which I also wrote by hand on paper. Then I used a hex editor on the desktop to manually write the hex values into a file and used it as the bootloader i.e as the first 512 bytes.

The whole exercise gave me a sense of hard grounded zero magic, raw, unfiltered experience. This is an experience that is hard to replicate in any other way. I deliberately did that so as to peel away as much magic/abstraction layers as I possibly can.

Later on when I started using C, I never had to learn C but merely just had to reference the equivalents of the assembly language. Like how the primitive "if" doesn't exist in the hardware but is a composition of cmp and jmp instructions. Seen this way, C becomes a glorified portable syntactic sugar over assembly language.

Then higher up the ladder to C++ for object oriented problem solving while retaining the spirit of functional programming. Rust was a breath of fresh air, where correctness across a myriad of use cases was a first class primitive.

Each abstraction layer can thus be evaluated for its utility in problem solving while its underlying mechanics remain understandable down to the hardware level.

More recently, our own arcc compiler extends correctness to our architecture and not just the types.

So if you are young and have time to spare, I suggest a little bit of Assembly => C => C++ => Rust.

This essentially makes you immune to hype train bullshit.