A lot of instructions/tutorials over-generalize their instructions to suit many situations and use jargon that new, aspiring devs may get confused about. Consider this a "vertical slice" to get you from start to finish via a linear path of progression.
The following instructions assume that the Dalamud plugin you want to contribute to is on GitHub. It also assumes that you are using Visual Studio 2022 (the latest version of VS as of writing this).
Do you have experience making your own basic command-line programs using an object-oriented language like C# (or Java, Python, Swift, C++, Javascript, etc.)?
Is your trouble that you find it overwhelming to open someone else's existing huge project and know how to navigate it or know how to build the code and test out changes?
Do you have a basic knowledge of pulling and pushing to and from a git repository with the exception of conflict resolution?
If yes, to all of those questions, these instructions will break it down into very specific steps to get you to accomplish your goal as soon as possible without needing to learn all the extra GitHub and Visual Studio features right away.
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Download and install the latest version of Visual Studio Community edition: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/
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During the installation, install the .NET Desktop development option.
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Create/login to your own GitHub account.
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To the GitHub page you want to contribute to.
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Fork the repo to your own GitHub account. (Skip this step if you just want to build from source.)
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Go to your forked copy of the project on GitHub. (Skip this step if you just want to build from source.)
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Click the green "Code" button.
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Click "Open in Visual Studio".
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In the "Solution Explorer" pane in VS, double-click the [project name].sln file to open the project. (The most counterintuitive part of this whole process. I know.)
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Search for what you want to search for using the "Find and Replace" pane (ctrl+shift+F), not the "Solution Explorer" search bar, which doesn't search through all of the text in your project. (Skip this step if you just want to build from source.)
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Make your changes. (Skip this step if you just want to build from source.)
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Open the dropdown in the toolbar that usually says either "Debug" or "Release" and choose "Release" if available, but most of the time, it won't matter either way.
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Build the code by clicking from the menubar, Build -> Build Solution.
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Take note in the Output pane where this particular project has chosen to place the build files with the .dll file extension.
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In the FFXIV Dalamud Settings -> Experimental tab, add the full, absolute path of the dev build location. And remove any part of the path at the end if it is in a "Debug" folder because you may want to build a "Release" version as well, which will show up in a sibling "Release folder instead.
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Now any builds you make will show up in the Dev Tools menu in the /xlplugins window in FFXIV.