its a bit of disservice to houdini for me to be the one evangelizing about it, so its best to some research on your own. that said:
houdini is all about breaking down the process.
take a staircase for example. it consists out of the actual stairs, railing and a balustrade.
balustrade can be a lathe based object, stares and railings are primitives. you pipe these elements together and then set rules to define each one and their relations.
height, width, number of stairs, the crossection of railing and balustrades can be also (depending how you set it up) freely and non destructively edited, retaining uv maps.
this gives artistic freedom and again makes iterating extremely easy. its also a lifesaver in scenarios when dealing with clients and sudden drastic changes.
i really think that people with a grasp on blueprints could flow with houdini quite well.
i never made my own node network though. usually i used it for clouds. for instance you can bring in any mesh and convert it into a volume with one click by using off the shelf solution. the cloud even has a noise function to control the advection of the volume.(making it smoother or a noisier cloud).
you can then at any moment dive into the nodes and try to reverse engineer what is going on, if you have no patience for tutorials like me.
apprentice version is free and can be used non commercially, but you lose any crossoperability aswell.
you dont need to look for H/UE specific tutorials. the workflow is as simple as importing the otl or any houdini file and treat it as a regular mesh, only with the extras of the exposed parameters. so you do not deal with a dead mesh but a live asset.
there is a clip showing houdini fire in unreal. will try and find it.