I like to shoot for the middle ground: skim for key functions and check those, run code locally to see if it does roughly what I think it should do and if it does merge it into dev and see what breaks.
Small PRs get nitpicked to death since they’re almost certainly around more important code
Got into making redstone logic in Minecraft, including joining a community of people building all kinds of crazy things like CPUs. This was early days too - I think the repeater was brand new
Eventually wanted to make mods so started learning Java. Was bad at it. Then wanted to make games in unity. Was bad at it. Learned C++ at Uni. Dropped out and was bad at it.
Kind of repeated this cycle for various languages and tools for years, never with enough motivation to learn properly. Eventually I hit a critical mass of skill and was able to actually make things in HTML/JS and over a couple years this snowballs until surprisingly quickly I find myself a senior developer teaching others!