I recently looked into using OSM for a side project and after going down a rabbit hole of researching 3rd party tools for generating (vector) tile sets and how to setup a tile server I eventually gave up (my mapping knowledge is limited to using Google Maps through their JS API). Can anyone point me in the direction of a more complete resource/tutorial that would help? Eager to get back on it at some point.
I clicked "Use an all-in-one solution" on the Serving Tiles page but it 404'd.
If you do not want to go down the rabbit hole, then Mapbox.com is the best to start, and you can slowly learn the difference between layers, tiles, vectorial, and their JS API is one of the best in the market.
Then once you are comfortable, move to Leaflet, while keeping Mapbox tile service, and then build your own.
As said already, hosting your own tile server isn't really an alternative to a service like Google Maps. I'd like to add that there are multiple such services listed on the "Providers" page of switch2osm, though I'd argue that they should be featured more prominently. I recommend MapTiler, as I've used their open source backend on a project once.
I don't have experience of generating vector tiles myself, but I do have a lot of experience with osm2pgsql and PostGIS now. From a quick look around, https://sparkgeo.com/blog/vector-tile-server-using-postgis/ looks quite accessible, but glosses over how to use them in the frontend.
I clicked "Use an all-in-one solution" on the Serving Tiles page but it 404'd.