[detaro]

There's a balance. Lots of people mostly learn programming by doing, and it's good since it provides motivation. One thing from your post is a big red flag for me though: " Often I find myself bruteforcing code until it finally works, not really being able to answer why it does."

At that point, if you want to make progress you should spend the time to understand why it does. If you use something existing and can't imagine how it works, try to figure that out.

Starting completely from scratch with learning might work too, but might be very boring as well.