I watched a couple battles at the most time dilation over the shoulders of college friends. They would have entire days of needing having EVE open on their laptop through every class and that gave me enough of an understanding to realize I probably wouldn't enjoy that.

I got a lot out of Empires of Eve which tells a lot of the big stories of Eve in a very approachable multiple volumes of history books: https://www.empiresofeve.com/

The author put so much amazing work into those, including interviewing people that were there for many of those battles and compiling great visualizations to help make the battles easier to read.