Should I be able to understand the react codebase given my experience level? I can’t understand it and I’m concerned that I’m not as good as a dev that I aspire to be. via /r/reactjs

So I’m in my final year of uni, my programming skills are at least in the upper half of my class (I’m not trying to brag btw, it’s just that about a quarter of students can’t code basic things like loops on their own). I’ve had 2 frontend internships which involved projects like government apps and football club software.

I’m trying to get into open source, so I looked at the react codebase to try and understand how it works under the hood. My motivation was to help out with some pull requests.

However, I’m not really sure where to start. It just seems like one massive monorepo maze. I apologise if my question is considered amateur level. I would just love to understand react behind the scenes.

Question for the people that understand the code base: how did you get started? 🙂

Tldr; I tried diving into the react codebase. I failed. Could I get some guidance on how to start understanding the codebase?