Thanks for sticking with this! I really do think it's worth it, once you wrap your head around it. I highly recommend watching the recent webinar (where that slide @mara posted came from), which might help to give you a bit of the bigger picture:
I know this can feel like a lot of hoops to jump through when you're just getting started, but learning to reason about whether a chunk of code is self-contained or not is a really important step in leveling up your programming practice. And the reprex package is a fantastic tool for sharing code with other people to get their help. Once you get used to doing things the reprex way, it cuts down enormously on the time you spend going back and forth trying to explain what your problem is, and it makes your questions much more fun and appealing for other people to answer, which over time gets you better answers faster. 