I’m still forgetting things I learned 3 or even 4 times like how to do a for each loop.

I have been programming for decades now and still have to look up how an if statement works in bash - or other similar things, especially when switching between languages. It takes 5 seconds to look up and remember so I would not bother worrying about it. Far better to know when you need to use an if or for loop and quickly look up the syntax then to know the syntax but not when to use it.

I see tutorials say to make a tic tac toe game or a calculator or to contribute to open source code. Which is good I suppose but all of it feels too advanced and I get lost on how to begin.

Break problems down into simpler problems, then break those down into simpler problems until you have a trivial problem you can solve. Then build up from there. Like take a tic tac toe game - lots of things to consider that can all be dealt with in isolation. Like rendering the game to the screen, that is one problem you can start with, and can be broken down even further to maybe how to draw a grid to the screen, which again can be broken down to how to draw a box or line.

You might even want to look at the book " Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving by V. Anton Spraul" which goes into this way of thinking in more detail.