Building a development host for Ansible content with Molecule?

[cidrbl0ck]

The title might be a smidge ambiguous.. allow me to explain;

I am not a software dev, nor devops.. the only experience I have with creating anything related to software is Powershell, some BASH and a good amount of Ansible playbooks.
I'm not schooled in application development, nor it's tooling or really the vocabulary used. I'm an admin whose luckily been able to silo himself into an Ansible-focused role for the past ~2 years. My development process as it were, up until now has been using vscode in an ssh session to an Ubuntu host with Ansible-Core and all the assorted bits like Builder, podman, buildah, etc installed. I craft the playbooks there and run them against a local inventory/vars that target real VM machines. Sometimes I can re-use a vm but most often I deploy new ones for that purpose.
If they work correctly on that dev host I commit them, build the template in AAP and then run them onto new hosts from AAP and if there are issues. Fix in vscode, commit, re-run..
It's ugly, it's inefficient, and quite embarrassing when I type it all out.

I came here looking for help because so far I've found nothing anywhere else. I've read about Molecule and I'd love to incorporate it into a real development process for playbooks and perhaps roles. I have absolutely no idea where to start so my question to everyone is:

Does anyone have, or know of, information pertaining to how one can go about building a dev environment specifically for Ansible related content, but not related to developing FOR Ansible as in the project.

Thank you!
(Forgive me if this is not the correct place to ask this. I've tried Reddit, Matrix, IRC.. I don't know where else to turn)