My two cents:

The most important thing I learned early on as a guitar player was a decent basic understanding of music theory. I'm talking very basics, like keys, how to build different types of chords, and the chord types that make up a particular key (i.e major, minor, dominant, diminished). After learning those kind of basics, after a while you can listen to 99% of songs (especially pop, rock, or country) and you will recognize one of the very few chord progressions that are pleasing to listen to, and you can then play pretty much any song.

I was so glad to luck into a guitar teacher who happened to care about these very basics. From there, it has been not only so much easier to play guitar and write songs, but sets you up to be able to play just about any instrument.

Sure, it helps at first to learn the fingering of a few 'cowboy' chords. But after that, I would still clear of anybody that promises to teach you to play "a thousand and one" chords or whatever. You learn how a chord is built, you will know how to make any chord yourself.

TLDR: The first 2 or 3 months will be painful bursts of horrible practice for 5 minutes, set the guitar down, come back in an hour,and repeat. One day you'll have an "ah-ha!" moment, and your life will be changed. After that moment, every time you pick up the guitar will be fun and you'll rapidly get better.

I cannot imagine having the wealth of information available at my fingertips now on the internet back when I taught myself to play 26 years ago.

My parents bought me a cheap crappy acoustic for my 15th. The shop owner gave me a sheet of paper with a few dozen chords diagrammed.

The first 2 months went like this:

1. Pick up guitar.
2. Awkwardly finger a chord
3. Strum
5. Try to switch to another chord
6. Crash, burn, roughly set guitar down
7. Walk out of room cursing.
8. Come back an hour later
9. Repeat

Took about 5 minutes at a time until I'd get pissed and quit.

2 months later I'm at my grandparents house and they had MTV. More Than Words by Extreme was gaining in popularity. The video shows a lot of close up shots of the sound hole and I could see just 2 or 3 strings vibrating at a time. I realized he was fingering a chord then plucking several strings at once.

I picked up my guitar and started the process above. When I got to step 3 I just randomly plucked 2 strings. Then I'd continue holding the chord and randomly pluck 2 different strings.

This was a watershed moment. Within a week I could suddenly switch basic chords without sounding like a train wreck. It all snowballed from there. I then started learning to read tab from guitar magazines. As soon as I learned parts of a popular song on the radio the hook was set even deeper.