I know the question "how to study math" has been asked dozens of times before in many variations, but (I hope) this one is different.

My goal is to study derived algebraic geometry, where derived schemes are built out of simplicial commutative rings rather than ordinary commutative rings as in algebraic geometry (there's also a variant using commutative ring spectra, which I don't know anything about). Anyways, since the category of simplicial rings form a model category, we can apply homotopy theoretic methods to study derived schemes.

I thought the first thing I should do is study simplicial homotopy theory, in order to learn about model categories and simplicial objects. So I started reading $\textit{Simplicial Homotopy Theory}$ by Goerss and Jardine. How should I study this book? There are very few exercises, unlike standard graduate textbooks like Hartshorne, and a lot of the proofs are simplex/diagram chasing, so I decided to skip a lot of the proofs and read the book casually.

A big disadvantage to this method is that I don't understand anything at a deep level and I'm only familiar with a few buzzwords. But I feel overwhelmed by the amount of prerequisite material I need to understand to learn DAG, because most of it is written in the language of $\infty$-categories. So what should I do? How can I get to "research level mathematics"?

EDIT: I'm a senior math major and I've taken the graduate algebraic geometry and algebraic topology sequences. I've also studied some deformation theory.