I'm not sure how and where or indeed if to contribute, but as a programmer who learned digital electronics (stack of free 74xx chips) before diving into program

I'm not sure how and where or indeed if to contribute, but as a programmer who learned digital electronics (stack of free 74xx chips) before diving into programmable logic, one thing that really helped make these things click for me was thinking about hardware as transistors and learning the very basics of electricity and related physics. This helped me see digital electronics not as a sequential process but as a consequence of natural laws, like something dropping due to gravity. Thinking of a transistor as a voltage controlled switch (obviously simplified to the point of being wrong but works for understanding digital) and seeing how you can use those to build logic gates, and then use gates to build muxes and flip-flops and so on up was essential for my understanding HDLs. (Incidentally, all that has also made how computers and machine code work much clearer to me). I don't think I could've really done it without that foundation. And I certainly couldn't have done it by just thinking of Verilog with my programmer's idea of concurrency. It's obviously very low level and you'd have to gloss over a bunch of things, but I'd definitely start with transistors if I had to explain programmable logic to somebody.