At the risk of sending you down a giant rabbit hole, the book Designing Sound is all about making programmatic sounds with Pure Data, and open source low-code programming environment available for all platforms. From what I've read, the book is considered a classic in the video game sound world. It's really good. Combine that with the Cipriani book on PD and learning Ardour would give you a very good learning path.

I recently dated someone in her 30s with a DMA, and she she told me how proud she was to know me because I was the first non-musician friend she's ever had. It's a very deep and insular world.

Pablo Casals famously replied when asked why he was still practicing in his 70s that he "felt like we was making progress", so don't let yourself feel inadequate.

In the Axiom Verge noclip documentary, the dev talks about how everyone is surprised about how he really made the whole game himself (except localization + marketing (and I imagine final testing but...)).

And he was like "people say 'even the music?' The music was the easiest part!!!'

It does make me feel like once you get into the right headspace and figure out how most of the tooling works all of this becomes quite smooth.

A light weight journaling of your learnings as you go along would probably be real beneficial to many (such as myself who has zero knowledge on the subject of DAWs and creating music effects for games). And since you said it’s very challenging maybe writing about it in small bite-sized learnings might make the process easier? Going from “I must learn all this stuff!!” to “let’s see what audio gems we pick up in our adventure today”.

You might like SuperCollider! It's free and a programming language made for sound design. Just writing code - but quite far from a DAW.

Stuff like that sends me down rabbit holes and when I finally come up for air, I say, "Gee, now I see how people can build their entire career around this!"