People look down on Javascript (and therefore Typescript) but as someone who learned by doing I think its a really good option
Once you get past the hello world phase you can take it any direction you want: websites/apps, command-line stuff, desktop apps you name it. Just avoid the trap of getting sucked into specific frameworks or loads of tooling early on and learn the language
W3schools is a great resource and you can do the examples and exercises right there in your browser
I like to shoot for the middle ground: skim for key functions and check those, run code locally to see if it does roughly what I think it should do and if it does merge it into dev and see what breaks.
Small PRs get nitpicked to death since they’re almost certainly around more important code