As someone who works in the amorphous realm of "digital strategy", I was pursuing this exact "learning path" by deploying my personal website on Digital Ocean, where your droplet is a blank slate, and you have to configure everything.
Given the number of help threads and spotty documentation I had to look through to deploy a simple Wordpress site, I'd say it was more of a hassle than anything else. Unless you plan on doing this several more times, at which point you'd likely have worked the kinks out, stick with deepening your knowledge in an existing area of proficiency.
Not to turn a Netlify topic into a DigitalOcean topic, but when you created your droplet did you select the pre-built Wordpress option? May have helped you a bit. (I used dokku-wordpress[0] on my dokku imaged server, personally.)
I did not, specifically because I wanted to learn how DO worked, without any "Wordpress 1-click wizard" stuff. Bluehost has the same "Instant Wordpress" thing that I avoid, as I write my own CSS and page templates and I wasn't planning to use an off-the-shelf theme.
On DO, I learned that you have to set up everything yourself, like SSH, Apache, MySQL, PHP, SFTP. I haven't found good documentation on how to set up a Git workflow from my local dev environment, so that's the next step. I have a non-database PHP site I plan to use for that.
Given the number of help threads and spotty documentation I had to look through to deploy a simple Wordpress site, I'd say it was more of a hassle than anything else. Unless you plan on doing this several more times, at which point you'd likely have worked the kinks out, stick with deepening your knowledge in an existing area of proficiency.