So I am looking for an online forum where I can ask questions and be welcomed and tolerated even though I'm a beginner.
Are there question and answer forums dedicated to electronics and electronics packaging manufacturing?
A lot depends on the type of product. Even a generic split such as Industrial vs. Consumer can be a huge differentiator. I build prototypes of industrial electronic devices in my basement; I won't touch consumer products because I just don't want to deal with designing to that kind of price point.
For something more practical, especially if it's Consumer Electronics related I'd suggest going to Seeed Studio and posting on the forums there. If you want something local, google "electronics consultants" or "electronics contract manufacturer" in your general area.
It's somewhat not very active but whenever people come with genuine questions that need help will get pointed in the right direction by people in the field doing what you are looking for.
I found r/electronics and r/AskElectronics helpful for electronics questions but the best help I got was from asking engineers directly, whether electrical/mechanical/industrial.
If you're near a big city, I highly recommend hardware meetups or makerspaces.
I also found Bunnie Huang's The Hardware Hacker great.
Packaging if you mean the box should be easy once you're working with a Chinese factory. They usually have a relationship with packaging suppliers and can get great custom packaging for you with steep discounts with at least a 1000 MOQ (minimum order quantity).
Electronics manufacturing is a lot harder depending on what you're trying to build. One of my clients sells millions of dollars worth of electronics without an engineer on his team though, so I'm guessing it's not rocket science. If he did have an engineer on his team, I'm sure he would save a lot when it comes to quality products and QC though.
If I had to build an electronics product today I would get a working prototype. If I could build the working prototype myself, I would build the first 100 myself. If you can order all the parts and put it all together to test the market, I would. If I can confirm/prove demand, then I would talk to factories. Factories could help discuss what parts cost what and what manufacturing process might be best etc. In order to talk to factories, I would talk or find a sourcing agent. Or best might be an expensive consultant to hold your hand through it, a technical co-founder, or a mentor.
I tried to build a hardware product 2 or 3 years ago, a wireless portable charger. I never went through with it because of feature creep and I was poor and stupid. I could easily build it today though because many of them already exist. It would be as simple as finding a factory and making an order. For the portable wireless chargers, it was just sticking two existing parts together with a new circuit board. I think anyway since I'm not an engineer. That's how I built my prototype- I took things apart and put them back together. If you're not building anything too innovative, you could see if you can build what you want with existing parts as well instead of custom.
I'm sure I'm missing some things like expensive certifications ($10k?) or manufacturing problems but I think you can definitely test and there is a great hardware hacker community out there somewhere. Last but not least, I could be wrong but I would presume a 1000 MOQ for a hardware product. Some of my client's factories quoted him 10,000 MOQ. At a cheap price of $10/unit that is $10,000 to $100,000. These were for existing designs/products that the factory already made. Some of his other products had a $30+/unit cost. If you need a custom mold for your product, it might cost you $1k+. Last they may steal your intellectual property.
I'm assuming you aren't interested in info about how to build prototypes, but there are lots of examples scattered across sparkfun, adafruit, eevblog, hackaday, github, arduino and AVR forums, etc. with example designs and varying degrees of documentation and support. If you choose some dev platform like ESP8266/32, MBED, Arduino, etc. there is often a forum associated with it.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ is nominally what you are looking for, but the content is almost all on the design side vs. manufacturing. There are probably a few people on there who can answer the questions you probably want to ask. I have no idea how friendly they are.
I think the issue is compared to software, electronic goods are an incredibly expensive process to bring someone up to speed on, and there are orders of magnitude fewer english speakers doing it vs. programming. It pretty much requires producing multiple products in the real world before you are anywhere near ready to manufacture a product at any appreciable volume. Yes, that's a catch-22 for most people. Couple that with the needing to go overseas to make anything that's price sensitive, needing years to connect with a full array of reliable suppliers, and the guys who really do the work often speak a different language, and you don't end up with many people who can or want to sit online and gratis help out anyone who isn't already sending them purchase orders for thousands of units.
Consumer goods generally aren't profitable to manufacture until you're making 10k units or so. So most people who truly know how to do this sort of thing don't have the inclination to help someone who just wants to play and learn, or even someone who doesn't already have 95% of the skills to pull of a successful product. The fastest way to bankrupt a manufacturing company is to take on a bunch of jobs with halfway thought out engineering done by noobs who don't know how to move from step A to step B.
Seeedstudio offers a service where they will produce low volumes: https://www.seeedstudio.com/propagate/
Crowd Supply is sort of aligned with what you are after (they sell themselves as a crowdfunding platform who specializes in hardware projects and they vet your project for feasibility): https://www.crowdsupply.com/
If you just want a few pieces of something made, need this to be done in a finite amount of time, and you have some money to spend, I'd recommend hiring an experienced EE and make sure they can deliver some small quantity of tested-working boards as part of the contract.