My hunch is that you should lean towards breaking things down, at least at first anyway. In a way, learning is really just about increasing your ability to identify and distinguish between ever more intricate patterns. This process necessarily builds on itself, so you should start at the bottom where the patterns are as simple as possible (or at the level where they're just within your current understanding).
As for how to break down music production, you'd want to do it so that the patterns are broken down to a level you can start learning. So mixdowns are a kind of pattern, compression is a pattern within that, sidechain compression is a pattern within that, etc. You'd probably learn something useful by trying to break it down yourself - it would help you to understand all the elements that go into production and how they relate to each other. Would probably make a pretty interesting tree diagram actually.
This is something I read when I was interested in coding, but there's no reason why it can't also apply to music production tbh:
5 Tips for Power Learning
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