Advice from a guitar semi-newbie to any others on this board wanting to learn.

You'll never make progress again like you do in the first 6 months. It's a slow improvement from there on. Record yourself often and date the recordings. Play the same thing at future intervals, 6 months, a year, etc. You'll be pleasantly surprised at the progress you've actually made if you commit to this and practice like you should. Also, learn music theory. I can't understand why people are so averse to it. It makes you better in every way.

I'm not a great guitar player but the above was the best advice I received on my guitar journey.

Scales and theory are how you get good, but a beginner isn’t at the stage where they can really take advantage of that yet. Beginners need to focus on the basics first:
1. Reading tabs
2. Fretting
3. Strumming
4. Bar chords
5. Quickly changing between chord shapes to develop muscle memory
6. Strumming along with simple 3 and 4 chord songs
7. Palm muting
8. And learning simple blues progressions in E and A

Once they’ve got that down, I would start moving on to scales (starting with blues pentatonic, then major and minor), then box method, then basic music theory (major/minor progressions, 1-5-7 songs, 4 chord songs, verse/chorus structure, etc).

Once they’ve got their hands dirty on that, I would move on to bends, alternative tunings, vibrato, finger picking, taps, pinch harmonics, etc. If they were an electric player, I’d start educating them on effects and amplification.

Next would be modes (dorion, ionian, etc), then finally more advanced techniques that I haven’t really mastered like chicken picking, slide guitar, sweep picking, and more advanced song writing

That first phase, especially bar chords and fretting is the hardest and most painful stage, but if someone can pull through that, it gets much much more fun.