If I'm honest, I'm one of those newbs who is using a tutorial. I did think to myself that I wished there was something that taught the basics of scripting in Gamemaker. I do use the documentation too, and try to make my own stuff up, but I have never been good at learning from text in a book. I'm much better at learning from seeing someone do something in front of me, or in a video, so the text documents don't make too much sense to me. They sort of just appear garbled to me most of the time!
However, when I watch the tutorials, I copy exactly what they are doing first of all, and then I will go on to try to make my own adaption of what they have done but change things around so it's not exactly the same (without copy/pasting code). For example, I just completed Heartbeasts' "Your First Game" tutorial series on Udemy, with the top down shaceship shooter. I'm now making my own version, and I've changed the direction the game plays in, so by doing that, I've learned a lot about how the axis works in Gamemaker, and how to manipulate objects on different axis. This weirdly took me a while to get used to, despite being dead simple! I'm also trying to add smaller, new features such as adding save game features (which wasn't covered in the tutorial), and unlocking new characters after getting to a certain score. I like taking what I'm taught, and trying to carry it on further.
I will also trawl around the net for deeper explanations of what each command I come across does (and if I struggle to understand it, I will come back to it later).
I'm not a fan of explanations where people just type out some code without explaining it and expect you to copy/paste it. I would rather not use that code, and find my own way of doing it if I am unable to understand what I am using if that's the case. I love when people explain their thought processes behind their work.
I totally understand the salty feeling though. When I started learning 3D art, it was much harder to learn as I didn't have much internet access. Now you've got people coming in, making a bad model and whacking PBR shaders on it and hey, it automatically looks awesome, but do they really understand the why things work the way they do? Does this model even animate? Oh gosh, why are there so many Ngons?! D: