As a self taught developer, I tried to learn “bottom up”, i.e. starting from low level concepts in my early teens. Everything I tried to learn bounced off of my brain, and what really got me going was picking up Python, and later Ruby (not rails) in the early 2000s.
This eventually grew into a successful career, and I spent most of my professional life not really knowing much more than the general gist of lower level stuff.
More recently, I decided to go back to trying to learn this and it’s like discovering a whole new world. 20 years of coding gave me great intuitions for higher level code, but left all of these unanswered questions about how it works at a lower level. And it’s making me fall in love with code all over again, because now it all makes so much sense, and answers these questions I sometimes forgot that I had. Taking this a step further and going down to the level of circuits is even more mind expanding, and has been a joy.
If you’ve been coding for a long time and this all seems hard to imagine breaking into, all I can say is: try again! You might be surprised at how much easier it will be now.