Hardware recommendations?

[JanRocketMan]

Hi! I'm a big noob in this topic, so thank you in advance for any tips!

I wanted to implement this project (or at least tiny part of it) on some particular FPGA board, which as I understand should be possible if I write Verilog code for it correctly. Since I have no idea how difficult that is I wanted to start with something cheap.

After some googling I found several variants that could work:

1. XIAO Spartan Edge board. Super cheap and great vendor, and also supports some Arduino FPGA API, but the project seems abandoned and there are almost no docs or code or guides for it.
2. Digilent Basys 3 Artix-7. A bit more expensive, claims to be beginner-friendly, but looks very old (I read VGA connector can cause issues) and over-bloated (they provide guides in Vivado Design Suite which looks like a VS 2003 to me).

Do you have any suggestions on this topic? Maybe there are some more modern options that you have in mind?