What are some good resources for quickly getting a good intuition for abstract syntax trees and parsers? Ideally hands-on with Python

There are the books by Prof. Wirth which cover recursive descent compiler construction (he used it for Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon), and then there are some great YouTube lectures by Douglas Crockford

Try this - https://greentreesnakes.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Even Python's official AST doc will point you to this. Apart from that if you have very specific query please reach out to me. I am working in this domain extensively. I have also looked and worked with tree-sitter and bblfish (by source-d) So I can tell you one thing or two about this

not super experienced with python but would imagine http://pythontutor.com/ to be a good starting point if you haven’t already checked it out