I am quite new to this and probably a bit late but I found reading logs was the most beneficial. I put even in some automations extra logfile writes to track what exactly was happening and i found out early on that alot of things are errored and warned in the logs that do not come out at all in the configuration checks.
One other thing is restarting… some things work it seems by just updating the configuration.yaml and doing a reload of it … sometimes it works when doing quick reload, sometimes soft restart and finally when all else fails i do a full reboot which solves some other issues that it seems the restart does not fix. … here is something i found interesting around that 
Additionally you have in the developer tools not just YAML checks but states area that I also found to be very helpful.