... however I'm a little overwhelmed with the amount of information online.
That is the main problem with ARM these days.
A small microcontroller has over a 1000 pages of datasheet, I once downloaded the datasheet for the Ti Sittara (used on BBB) which was something like 3500 pages.
And that's just the datasheets for the IC's. Manual for GCC is also of similar size and then there is documentation for tools, application notes, tutorial websites and what not.
I quite like the ST-Link V2 clones from China Direct. Even though they are undocumented and can various brands of uC's can be inside it. I think the last I used had a uC from APM in it, but STM32Cube detected an "old firmware version", I clicked "OK" to update it and after that it still worked.
And apparently you can turn these into a "Black Magic Probe", which would turn it in an universal tool which can also be used for other JTAG based stuff, but I have not tried it myself.
Usually each chip manufacturer has some recommended programmers for their IC's, or have hardware that only works for their IC's. There are also companies that concentrate on making more generic tools such as Segger, but these (more powerful) tools tend to be much more expensive too.
Such companies can never compete with an USD 3 ST-Link Clone from China.
Any help steering me in the right direction would be appreciated!
So you have pretty much two directions to choose between. A generic programmer, (relatively expensive) or a simple programmer that works with your brand of uC (Pricing starts at USD 3)