If you want some excellent(the best I've ever seen) resources to learn about mathematics in general, https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown https://www.youtube.c

If you want some excellent(the best I've ever seen) resources to learn about mathematics in general, https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown arguably has the best content for learning about maths. His videos singlehandedly made me much more interested in maths than any textbook or teacher. He not only relates topics he teaches to real life examples of using them, but his main goal is to provide an intuition for a lot of the theory that goes behind the maths we learn. I understand what you are saying about abstraction being used to create elitism, and I think that you need to have a concrete understanding of an idea to understand an abstraction/generalisation of it. One problem with a lot of maths we tend to learn is that it's often taught in the reverse order of how it's discovered. Typically, mathematicians intuitively "know" that something is true(I think the term for it is a moral proof, but I could be wrong here), and then work their way up to a rigorous proof. In my experience, the maths I was taught was often starting with the rigorous proof and then the intuition behind it. This style of teaching is good for passing an exam but it does leave gaps in groking stuff you learn. One question I always had was "how in the world did the mathematicians that discovered this come across this?". Good luck on your learning journey :)