Most of what the F1/Tutorial for Quest seems to teach operates a little differently from the Gamebook side of things. The Text Adventure side seems to be the default way the tutorial opts to teach you, while the way that you navigate editing and working with the Gamebook is different enough that much of the Tutorial fails to apply. If anyone has a Gamebook-specific Tutorial area that I can properly understand how to make a semi-simple game, please link it, or share with me your wisdom.

Yes, the tutorial is for the text adventure type of games. In general the Gamebook mode has some less features as it uses different libraries. Even though I don't have a tutorial at hand, I tried to make my stories in this mode but ended up switching to text adventures most of the time. Still I might have some tips and tricks that I learned while trying.

Is there anything specific you struggle with?

The main difference is that you only have pages instead of rooms and objects. To some degree you can misuse pages as objects though, but this has limitations. Instead of using these objects you should use simple flags and variables which are stored in game and player.
It is also helpful to organize your pages in blocks by building a tree, i.e. create a page called "act_1" and place all pages belonging to that act there; do the same with "act_2", "act_3".

Overall, even though you might want to create a gamebook, I suggest you follow the tutorial first and learn the basics, as quite some stuff also applies to the gamebook mode.

Most of the issues mostly just come from everything applicable to text-adventure not being applicable in a manner that is transferable. A lot of the visible noob-friendly tools that make the possibilities of the interface GUI in the text-adventure editor understood are not present in the gamebook editor, and that is confusing, especially as the gamebook on the surface seems like the less-advanced beginner-friendly option, yet somehow rears itself as the inverse?

Except for the lack of a dedicated tutorial it is more beginner friendly. But it is also specialized on a different format of story telling.

A gamebook is more about narrative control as you want to tell a branching story, which means huge blocks of texts and less need to define many objects.

In a text adventure on the other hand you typically don't directly tell a story. Instead it get's told through the players interaction with the world you have set up. Most commonly the story unfolds as you solve the riddles you have set up. Search, manipulate and combine items, maybe talk to characters placed in the world, but there are also many text adventures where the player is the only living being in the game world.

I personally learned most of the stuff by picking up an old gamebook I had as PDF and tried to convert it into the gamebook format (obviously due to copyright reasons you can never release such a thing, but it is good for training anyways). As these gamebooks usually have sections, I named my pages accordingly (like s_001 to s_350 for a gamebook with 350 sections). At first I was also changing the text a bit so I could use the page linking section at the bottom. Later on I included the links within the text of the page as it was done in the original. As the gamebook I used was based on a pen&paper roleplay system I also needed to come up with a way to either replace or replicate the skill checks, which introduced me to the functions and scripting and consulted the documentation and forums with specific questions.
By "reverse engineering" the story in that way I also learned a lot about how that story was structured... and how lazy the author was in ending the story in many cases.

Anyway, I think doing this was actually more helpful for this story format than the tutorial, which on the other hand works best if you do create a text adventure following the examples.