Technique is important. It's how you get any instrument, including your cigar box guitar, to do what you want it to. Think of a cabinet maker with a chisel, or a hunter with a rifle or any sportsperson ever. It helps to get it right.
There'll be different ways to play that work for different people and there's no one correct way to do anything, but we need to be able to operate our instrument efficiently if we are to have any hope of getting it to do what we want it to do.
Let's start with what not to do:
Avoid at all cost
Don't start with one finger chords. You need a fair amount of pressure to get your finger all the way across the strings and the easiest way to do this involves a very poor left hand position, grabbing the neck like a broom handle. Don't do it.
Don't point your thumb up the neck. Often a result of starting with one finger chords, pointing your thumb up the neck is the most common problem for beginner players and is excrutiatingly difficult to fix once it becomes a habit.
Don't use two fingers to hold your pick, it should rest between your thumb and the side of your index finger. It's a little harder to hold at first but allows you to pick up speed and precision later on. Again you won't get it right just by being told about it, you need to build these skills.
Don't press the slide down on to the fretboard. Should be a no-brainer but I've seen plenty of people do it.
Don't play vibrato just because you can't get your pitch right. Get your pitch right.
The beginners trap
If you try to play these, or any instruments, without a solid grounding in basic technique then you will inevitably fall short. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. You'll get away with it for a little while, and there's the trap, but if there's no magic bullet here. Your intial foray maight sound OK, for a beginner, but unless you get the basics right you won't get far.
The basics
Essentially it comes down to repetitions. You're training your brain and your muscles to do new movements and you just need to repeat them lots of times so that they become second nature, literally like riding a bike. The trick is to know what movements to repeat, if you get it wrong and learn a bunch of techniques that might be easy to start with but will eventually inhibit your playing then you'll either have to relearn everything or never move beyond a very limited repertoire.
Don't think that you just find an easy song and learn to play, it simply doesn't work like that. So many of the people that I see on social media playing these instruments have obviously learned to operate their instrument the wrong way . And yes you can get it wrong, If your technique doesn't allow you to do the fundamental things you need to play, such as play in time at different tempos, get your ptich accurate, play fundamental rhythmic and melodic patterns, then you're doing something wrong. To the trained eye it is painfully obvious what is going on and it comes down to one simple idea:
Beginners don't need to learn what to play, they need to learn how to play.
Skills aren't just acquired, they are built from the ground up. It's never good enough as a teacher to simply say 'hold your hand like this' or "mute behind the slide', students need to develop these skills using exercises and songs relevant to their stage of learning. That's why single videos, on YouTube, or anywhere else, without context, without a range of supporting resources, simply fall short.
Precision is crucial. All of these movements that you're making are being orchestrated by your brain based on what you can hear. The more refined your technique and the more precise your movements, the closer you are to recreating the sound that you can hear in your head. Along with training your muscles you're training your ear too.