[cauterized]

Non-code contributions are super valuable. They're not "doing open source wrong".

But rebuilding it from the ground up is rarely the best way to try to understand a codebase. You're both biting off more than you can chew and at the same time requiring yourself to build code for concepts you don't yet fully understand.

If you want to get deeper into the code, ask your fellow maintainers to help you do it slowly.

Ask them to assign you a few easy changes - just as you'd do when learning a new codebase for a new job. You can start with something as simple as tweaking copy in a hard-coded string, and move up from there.

With specific tasks you also have a defined learning curve for picking up bits and pieces of how it works, and an excuse for asking for explanations.

Another thing to try might be to start reading the commit history of the codebase from commit zero. However, that's a LOT of code to read, its usefulness (and tractability) depends on the original developers' commit habits, and you still won't have the conceptual guidance around why things were done a specific way.