I usually recommend picking an LTS ("long term support") release and finding tutorials about those to establish a baseline familiarity with the interface and fe

I usually recommend picking an LTS ("long term support") release and finding tutorials about those to establish a baseline familiarity with the interface and features. LTSs won't change for as long as they're supported. After that, Blender makes it easy to manage concurrent versions, so it's fine to just download and run additional versions if you're feature-chasing from a new tutorial or looking for a bug fix. Blender is a lot of people's first modal, process oriented software, and it does require a different mindset than working in other tools where menus and windows are all available from one interface. I'd still argue the amount of conceptual mastery and memorization needed for each is basically the same.