recently a similar question came up. Feel free to check out this thread. Maybe the TF specialisation or MLOps specialisation might be worth a look: After completing DLS, what's next - #4 by Christian_Simonis
When it comes to understanding and use methods from papers, I can definitely recommend to get your hands dirty and get practitioners experience which is usually something where you will encounter new challenges and lern a lot, e.g. if you apply the method to a new data set or play around with parameters etc.
On this note, this page might be interesting for you: https://paperswithcode.com/ as well as following authors, thought leaders or institutions of your interests on Github for example.
Personally, I guess there is no shortcut but if you can keep the motivation up and practice regularly, I am optimistic you will succeed.
What do you think?
Best regards
Christian