Anyone else encounter circular dependencies when trying to learn stuff

For my first 2 years

No. Never.
Don’t even know what that is.

To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

Not while learning so much but when trying to refactor old code :P

not much anymore, sometimes still.

It's because when you're just playing around and learning new things, code quality and best practices go out the window and as far as I'm concerned that's ok when just playing around with new stuff. But still over the years I did pick up on enough basics to avoid it for relatively simple testing projects