Finally rooted! Fun box for nubs and learned a thing or two. I will say there has been a lot of resetting of the box unnecessarily. I reset it once myself but only because someone overwrote the needed binary with their reverse shell (LOL). Other than that the box was pretty stable.
Initial: Don’t reset the box over and over when you cant figure it out, start paying attention to hints given in front of you, then go from there. Basic OSINT is your friend.
User: Learned a little about a new language, make sure to, once again, read whats in front of you to get user.
Root: I overthought this one way too much. My suggestion is to make sure you understand basic operations in the Linux OS. Then it will click (at least it did for me).