> I ended up just playing around with putting attributes on various components until I found what worked.

It's sometimes hard for me to wrap my head around flexbox as well. If you haven't already seen it, this page [0] is imo the flexbox bible. There's one for grid [1] too.

[0] https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

[1] https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/