Well, until you start understanding the game mechanics, you can follow a build guide.
I do not, and I roll my own builds, and I will say they are generally quite successful. I can get ideas from guides, or other builds on poe.ninja, but then I still research and adjust to my liking, budget, and playstyle.
Rolling a build is more than half of the game for me, and I spend a lot of time tuning and testing.
So yeah I’d say there are several layers to playing PoE:
Playing the campaign and a few maps casually without looking something up. It is still a great experience to discover things and the complexity at your own pace. You won’t get to do the true endgame though, but it is an experience you can have only once, so I would personally recommend to go through it and see how you like it.
Go with a well described build by someone else. You can reach the endgame, learn how the game works, how the mechanics work, how the market works, how farming works, and lots more things.
Start rolling your own build. It’s like switching games at this point, theorycrafting a build is the true game, and POE is just a frontend for testing your build. And it feels awesome when you succeed and complete something you can call your own and see it do well. And it is iterative, you learn how building a character works so that you can do even cooler things next time.
And also do achievent/challenge hunting.
I’ve only followed a build once. And it was fun. Then I rolled my own, and it was more fun for different reasons.
But definitely needs a lot of time investment long term. It should probably take a couple of years for you to be able to claim you know what you are doing. But thankfully, the game respects you and does not demand your immediate time investment. You can play at you own pace. I have work and family, I play for a couple of hours every few days mostly. And it is fine. No one is pressuring me with daily quests and shit like that. I play because I feel like playing. I pause and play other games no problem, depending on my mood. It’s great.