I owe my love of chroot to Gentoo.
The guide[1] is incredibly straightforward and easy to follow.
My arc was gentoo -> lfs -> arch Linux when I realized I didn’t want to fiddle as much.
Personally, gentoo is nice because, once you know your way, you can do a big emerge and go get a coffe while it compiles everything.
Obviously it should also install any additional apps like vim, adjust terminal colors, create and copy your ssh keys to machines needed, and configure any windows managers, etc as well from the single shell command.
Making that single shell command as small, reliable, readable, and maintainable as possible is the real challenge.
Especially if you are the kind of learner who needs to be challenged to truly ingest the material at hand, just read every word and apply what you have learned. You'll be astonished by the distance that you covered in a month!
Whenever Gentoo is brought up, somebody always brings up LFS.
LFS becomes repetitive fast. I also don't think trying to use esoteric build systems that come with cryptic readme files is newbie-friendly. Just learn to read ebuild scripts if you are after that kind of skill :)