Buying hardware is extremely daunting

I am a Software Engineer and a gamer, so I have some idea of what every component does and what my computer needs more of. I am currently planning to buy both a new desktop, and 2 new servers, one for network and another to be a dedicated Proxmox machine.

However, trying to buy any hardware is insanely daunting. I can basically follow hardware generations for consumer grade stuff, such as an 11th gen Intel i6 being worse than a 12th gen Intel i6. Or a 3060 being worse than a 4060. And I know what all the metrics mean and what they entail (Hz on a CPU is instructions per second, RAM and VRAM are just space for caching stuff, etc...) but then I open any benchmarking website and compare two different components and some insane metrics crop up I've never seen before and I go down a rabbit hole to figure out what it is, or I at least figure out if more is better, or less is better.

Specially for my network machine I am terribly lost. I am stuck with an ISP AIO, as any other setup requires me to pay extra where I live. So I want to put it in bridge mode and use it as a simple modem for internet access, but then I don't have WiFi. And I need a computer capable of serving as a full-on router but I would like open-source firmware and then I'm stuck with kilometric compatibility lists that I can't parse.

How do people do it? How do I learn enough to confidently make hardware decisions? Any advice, specially resources to learn these things (courses, books, Youtube, anything really) would be highly appreciated.