LFS is great. Do it once, all the way through. Then go back and automate it yourself. Make your own build process, scripts, auto download sources and automatic

LFS is great. Do it once, all the way through. Then go back and automate it yourself. Make your own build process, scripts, auto download sources and automatically apply sets of patches. Make your own fakeroot system and assemble all three pieces into a working image file, auto tar the whole thing and make it easily deployable. That... is how you come to fully understand everything that goes into a basic bare-bones yet fully functional, <50MB Linux Distribution. Then do it again, but with a cross compilation toolchain (CLFS but using the build tooling you've just created). I did this year's ago for the OG Raspberry Pi. I was frustrated by the lack of a minimal distro that just had the basics for serving websites and nothing else. Fast forward 6 months, all the above completed, amazed by how far I'd come... only to realize CentOS had been released for the RPi in the meantime. I'll never regret that time spent, though. It really does unlock a "next level" understanding of what a distro is. There is no magic, just a lot of hard work.