Bad Timing to Join Internet Marketing??

First off, I'm totally new to IM and SEO and I wish I could go back a few years and start then. Unfortunately I was young and had no idea what SEO even stood for and I thought people made all of the webpages on the web for fun - well not really, I just never thought about how/why they were there. And I'm kicking myself because everything seems so...not that it seems more complicated - it seems so fragile. Like everything I read is you can't do this and you can't do that.

I'm just reading the new guide that Neil Patel just put out. There isn't a whole lot on it that I haven't read before lately in some form or another. I was just in the middle of it and had to write this post because I am so lost.

How exactly do you rank a keyword?!?

So exact match domains are apparently done
You can put barely any keywords in your content
Such a small percentage of your anchor text can contain keywords
Pretty much all backlinking strategies are done

And the only real, credible backlinks are from guest blogging??

Is this really true?? Should I just pack up and forget about IM? And if the above is correct about keywords - how does google know which keyword you're ranking for??

And everyone talks about how much quality content plays a role...but what's the use if if you can't get the word out about your content because backlinking options are so limited? And if you say social media, my question is - what if you have a site like tunasaladrecipes.com targeting tuna salad recipes (for example obviously :p) you might have the best content..the best tuna salad, but people don't want to follow you on twitter and like you on facebook. They're just looking for a tuna salad recipe!

Sorry for the rant, I'm just wondering if I should not put so much effort into IM