[utopiah]

Before you dive too deep, check what's already available and let your tinker TODAY without having to solder anything. You can still do so, even design PCB and get them mailed to you (like I did, it's fun) but honestly spend a bit of time (and money) on CrowdSupply to see the plethora of fun and useful OSHW out there. IMHO only after having considered what's beyond the usual consumer electronics it is worth learning to build, not before.

[candiddevmike]

Is there any prototyping software you'd recommend that could do this? I'd like to play with this stuff virtually without having to spend meatspace time/money.

[utopiah]

Ah, funnily enough I'm a prototypist software by trade... but I have NO idea about that, none. Honestly you can find emulator, simulators, etc but typically those devices precisely only make sense because the emulated equivalents do not. For example I just received a DeepDeck ... it's "just" a macropad, so basically a glorified partial keyboard. It's OSHW and open source so you "could" run the Web stack locally to "configure" it ... and yet you'll never know what it "feels" like to turn a physical knob in order to navigate between browser tabs. You can imagine doing it ... but it's still quite different.

Anyway there are plenty of things like https://wokwi.com and it's fun ... but it's NOT like the actual hardware. Most of those projects precisely make sense because of the tangible aspect, or because you support a "vision" (e.g. Precursor) and learn while tinkering with them.

So... no unfortunately sorry I don't have any recommendation for doing this virtually. Maybe it exists but I'd caution against thinking it's equivalent.