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You only need a few years of cooking as a serious hobby to make better food than the majority of restaurants out there. In fact the majority of restaurants aren't really very good. You'll notice the compromises, flaws, and inadequacies as you cook more and more. While you won't have the same volume of practice and as sharp a skill set as professionals, there are a lot of advantages you'll have when cooking too. The amount of thought and care you can put into a dish can reasonably exceed anything done outside of the top few tiers of restaurants. You have more versatility in what you do. You have no expectations to worry about meeting, no limits on the type/theme of food you're making, no worries about the business aspects of developing/making a dish, etc.

As long as you're making things that challenge you instead of just picking something from Allrecipes or the Food Network or something, you're going to notice really quick progress. Library book sales always seem to have a culinary arts textbook for a dollar. You'll learn a lot from those even if they do tend to be Eurocentric. Cookbooks from famous well-regarded restaurants are also a pretty good resource. You'll see a lot of interesting things that you otherwise wouldn't see. The French Laundry Cookbook is really easy to find for dirt cheap and it's a cookbook that's actually very accessible once you know your way around the basics. The Fat Duck cookbook is on the opposite side of the spectrum. You'll likely never make a single dish out of it, but reading through it can give a lot of ideas and a different view of ingredients and components. The Noma Guide to Fermentation is a good read if you're at all interested in fermentation (and Koji Alchemy if you want to delve a bit deeper into using koji). Though you'd probably want to go with something Art of Fermentation by Katz as a primer, but it's really not necessary. All these books and a lot more are on libgen. The more you make different dishes the more you'll notice patterns that. The more you make dishes that challenge you or do something that you're unfamiliar with the more you'll pick up new tools. The more you pick up the better you can improvise on your own. Every once in a while I look back at something I made and think how only a year previous I wouldn't have imagined doing something like that.

tl:dr: You can pretty much disregard all that since it isn't a competition anyway. No reason to worry about how you stack up to other people as long as you're getting a sense of satisfaction from your progress and whatever you produce. I'll never be an elite cook, and I'm ok with that. Or even a moderately competent musician, but I still like to play my instrument a few hours a week.