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This sort of low level stuff is so interesting to me but I feel out of my depth having not looked at this sort of stuff since undergrad. In a hypothetical world where someone wanted to contribute to v8, what are some good resources to get up to speed?

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If you mean JIT, then I'd recommend looking at PyPy, also other JS engines and Java HotSpot, to see what other techniques are out there, when they work, when don't and why.

Ultimately V8 is almost an ecosystem in itself, it's embedded into quite a few other software, the ECMA262 standard is continuously changing, the Web is changing, Chrome changes on top of all this, plus there is a lot of backward compatibility stuff.

You can look at the V8 bugtracker pick a task and try your luck.

There is a lot of content on V8's dev blog, with different depth, all pretty well written: https://v8.dev/blog

For sure the blog is great! But I’m thinking something more along the lines of “here’s how you’d build something like this” or “here’s the stuff to read to get started on a project like this”.

JIT engineers are mostly oddly specialized compiler engineers, so you're really looking at learning how optimizing compilers work as a prerequisite.

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