Personal opinion, I'd rather you build a specific thing, with perhaps brief periods where you talk about the pros and cons of the most notable options and then

Personal opinion, I'd rather you build a specific thing, with perhaps brief periods where you talk about the pros and cons of the most notable options and then why you chose what you did. As you said there's a joy in a complete system, and at least to me there would be value in discussing your set of whys because that can show people less used to system design the types of considerations involved. I will not fault you if you don't get to any such project (I remember discovering Crafting Interpreters around the time you were like... halfway through part one? and seeing how long it took you to get through the rest of the book. The care you take to both give useful technical information and make your writing clear takes a great deal of work), but I would certainly read it as I've read much of CI if it ever exists (I need to finish going through part 2, I'm up to Closures).