Nicely written guide. It's good to have steps, but in my experience having a guide wasn't necessary. There is another valid approach. Many people don't even have time for the whole learning process you have set out in the article. They might really want to do this, but physically cannot spare the hours of extra work to make it happen.

For example, I stared with small steps. Really small steps. When I started my journey from Manual QA to Automated QA, I used to make small scripts to automate a lot of my work. BASH scripts, Python scripts, NodeJS, anything. All of it was terrible code, but it worked. And you naturally learn how to use a VCS. I shared them with developers that I worked with and got a lot of feedback. Anyone who codes professionally loves someone who is learning to code. They love giving advice. They love seeing how bad your code is and they love helping you improve it. So I gradually figured out how to be better at creating automation scripts. I did this mainly in the spare time I had throughout my working day, like swapping break times for learning to code. Then, I moved on to the other steps, like trying different frameworks that you outlined in the article.