My goal is to use the tips functionality for several different types of "tips" broken into different categories. For the sake of simplicity, let's say I want a tips UI for just People and one for Places. My first instinct is to make a copy of all the tip related scripts and UI prefabs and have one look at a people.txt and one at a places.txt, but I am not sure where to start on editing the scripts to look for and manage that content.

Is this plausible at all for someone with nearly no experience programming from scratch?

By copying all the Tips files, you'd still need to override the OnPointerClick method in NaninovelTMProText to handle the clicking behaviour. The most simple option is probably to override TipsPanel and add several presentation modes and split the entries into several grids/lists akin to SaveLoadUI. Then on SelectTipRecord you can have it change the presentation mode/layout based on the category of the string.