Absolutely this. Wanna learn French? Go to France and live there for a year. Wanna be good at spinning up infrastructure with Terraform? Take an infrastructure job at a company that uses terraform - a start-up if possible, so you get to solve all of the problems. I wanted to learn Terraform and Kubernetes for years, and no amount of books or online courses really helped. Taking a job at a start-up fixed it. In fact, our stack is spookily similar to the one OP posted, Which is validation and also admiration because this person did it solo.