Yeaaa, but you know, there's nothing wrong with using tutorials as a stepping stone. You can glean a lot from stuff. There's just a lot that you won't know, which is why it's good to join a community because there's people from all walks of life. (Which, I mean, hey, you're on Reddit, so you're already there, lol.)
But yea, my first character that was human like (elf, actually) that I was really proud of was terrifying and while I used to be sad about it, now I just laugh. It's okay. It's all part of the learning process. So long as you learn something, that's all that matters.
Also, there's books on Amazon about character modeling:
I haven't tried them myself, but they might be useful to you.
A lot of stuff about modeling is just things you learn over time as you gradually get better--it's a process and you will totally get there.
Also, there's MakeHuman, and you can actually study how that has been modeled and rigged. (It's a free customizable make a human thing that you can use with Blender.) Just make something in there, export it as a FBX, import it as a FBX, and take time to look at the topology and flow.
The thing about learning low poly is that you can really learn how to use a lot with little. That way when you do high poly modeling, you can make the most out of it. It takes a significant amount of skill, at times, to make something low poly.
This is also really important because if you're going to be animating something, you need to understand, fundamentally, how the model is going to eventually animate when you are modeling it. That means you need to understand where the model is going to bend, how it's going to twist, what parts of it are going to screw up, etc. So you need to understand how many edges you need around the shoulders, knees, elbows, etc.
You can practice this by just making some objects and rigging them--it doesn't have to be anything specific. Also, the more polys you have, the more difficult something is going to be to rig. You'll learn this when you start studying weight painting and rigging. (There's IK and FK rigging, and there are plenty of tutorials on YT about this that explain it fully.)
Modeling is so much more than just making shapes and texturing them. (That is, if you're animating them, but it's always good practice to learn anyway.) You want to have good topology. (If you know what that is!)
Just remember you don't have to be perfect, and it's okay to make mistakes!
I wish you the best of luck and I hope this all helps.