I did not have such a path. I was involuntarily reassigned from a web design job to a web developer job at a major dot com way long ago before it was common do anything with JavaScript except some basic event handling functions. I just had to figure it out.

I stumbled through learning to write JavaScript by writing and maintaining basic event code. This was before Chrome and before Node.js. I then transitioned to writing a large original application in JavaScript.

Writing real original applications from the ground up is the true learning experience. You have to learn larger concepts of organization, central architecture, and more. It’s the difference between writing a novel versus a paragraph. If you aren’t learning this you really only have a working knowledge of syntax, which is just more than nothing, but it’s still enough to get employment.

It depends on how you define a tutorial. If a tutorial is a well-developed project that takes you from scratch, aligns with your tech stack, and has real-world relevance, then it has educational value. In fact, it’s very similar to learning on the job, because you’ll be working on a complete, real-world project. However so many tutorials are just fragmented, generically produced content.