I have to dig into it a ton to understand the context and the history and who each individual actor is and then I’ve wasted like a few hours without even noticing

Not sure how old you are (you might be older than me for all I know) but being confused when people are talking about a group in a country you've heard the name of approximately twice in your entire life is really just a natural part of learning about the world. Obviously there has to be some level of simplification, there aren't enough seconds in long lifetime to know even most things in significant detail about history (even if there was, by the time you'd learned it, more stuff would have happened while you were reading), but I found that after a year or so or fully immersing myself in these megathreads I was at a conversational level on a large number of places. I could very easily get clowned on by people who were natives, let alone were experts in the history and politics of many foreign countries, but I could myself clown on the majority of people on and offline around me.

But having Marxism - a pre-established, materialist, ideological lens through which to look at history and current events - gives you a handy shortcut, because it is an effective descriptor of human history and social relations and so on. At a certain point, you can just look at a situation and go "Oh, this is like the bourgeoisie-proletariat relationship but inside this country" or "This is a feudal relationship between lords and peasants" or "This is settler-colonialism" and while the details will be different in each case, the broad outline will usually be pretty similar.

On a practical level, I've increasingly turned away from the kind of "wikipedia-rabbithole" way of researching things, not only because wikipedia is a shitty website that is compromised by US-paid propagandists, but because there's this background of liberalism which I obviously wasn't able to sense when I was a liberal, but now that I'm a Marxist and have been for a little while, it's really obvious on certain issues. And, at the most fundamental level, I don't think it's really that conducive to learning even if you accept that a lot of stuff you might be learning is wrong or very biased in a pro-Western direction and try and account for it, because oftentimes you're rarely actually learning and retaining much anyway. It's the same reason why I negatively regard a lot of the history/geography/science youtube channels which produce very short and oversimplified - even sometimes admitting that they are oversimplified! - pieces on issues that are complex or deserve more treatment and nuance. The phrase "I learned more from this channel in one 10-minute youtube video than I did at school!" and similar phrases which I once laughed at as an adolescent now keep me up at night, as people swap out the oversimplified propaganda of the mainstream news media for oversimplified propaganda of youtube and TikTok videos. You learn these little soundbites that can never substitute for a fuller, systematic analysis that would take an entire book just to broadly describe all the intracacies of, let alone analyse. It's akin to believing that you're "actually much more interested in physics than when my boring teachers at school were lecturing us about it!" because you just watched a guy wrap a chain around a bicycle wheel and turn it to illustrate circular motion, and then slamming right into a wall of rigorous physics and equations when you actually try and get into it and feeling dejected because it doesn't seem that easy anymore.