Seriously, I thought I was crazy for not being able to figure out what this device actually does, despite scrolling through the whole site.

I still thought it would be an mp3 player after reading about the battery modes and the sd card installation and the file system menu...then I gave up.

Did you go to their main page instead of just their blog? https://flipperzero.one/

I can recommend CACM aswell. It's currently my only computer related magazine source. New Scientist magazine used to be worth a look too on a broad spectrum of popular science, it lately became more political and esotheric sadly though.

It took me hours to realize that all those beginner tutorials are based on v3 while I included current v5 and nothing worked.

I was litteraly unable to use the current version and went to implement v3 code based on tutorial and demo availability.

To this day I'm still planning to port everything to the current d3 version some time in the future.