The gap is real and it exists because you are looking for project ideas, which is the wrong search. Ideas that sound like products are either trivial or enormous. What works is much smaller and much less impressive.
Look for annoyances in your own week, not for products. Something you do by hand that a computer could do. The bar is deliberately low:
- Rename a folder of files to a consistent pattern
- Pull the numbers out of a monthly statement into a spreadsheet
- Tell you when a specific page changes
- Work out which of two things is cheaper, with your actual numbers
- Sort your photos by the date in the file rather than the date they were copied
None of these are portfolio pieces and that is not the point. What they have that a to-do list does not is that you know when they are correct, because you have the real data and you can check. That is the thing a tutorial cannot give you, and it is where the learning actually happens.
They are also naturally the right size: a few hours to a weekend, so you finish, which matters more than what you built.
The test for a good first project: can you describe what it does in one sentence, and would you actually use the result. If yes to both, build it.