Building up to a usable desktop in Alpine is a good way to start gaining some of that knowledge.
I had a laptop for a while that I built up from alpine-extended to a pretty nice side machine, complete with Sway, vim, Rust, Firefox, and a couple others.
Alpine Linux is a system which appeals to those who want to know how their system works (and to be responsible for it as such). If you don't want to know how your system works, and don't want to be responsible for it, then much of Alpine's value proposition is lost compared to other distros.