And the reason is because the person working on it had the database locally to their machine), and the database now exists in production remotely, so we have to download a clone of it (which is huge) in order for me to check things out. There's also no documentation for me to study.
The best thing I can do if I want to onboard myself (they haven't even assigned me issues to work on atm) is to read through the codebase on my own, which is one gigantic intimidating monolith and the entry point they had assigned was just a placeholder.
What can I do in my situation? I don't really want to throw everything out and call it quits because I really hurt for money and experience. I'm still a junior dev in terms of years of experience and I've been job seeking for 4 months and barely made it with the skin of my teeth, and in spite of my thirst for personal growth and quality environment the bills and rent won't pay themselves.
On top of that, I don't know whether I should start searching again if things don't improve or will this paint a giant target on me having people think like I'm a job hopping opportunist.
I guess my questions can be narrowed down to: 1. How can I speed-up my learning the codebase process when it's rough to get things going due to things outside my control? 2a. How long can I wait until things improve before I start applying again? 2b. If I start applying, should I list my latest experience of 1+ month on my resume?
If yes check if his old PC is already formatted.
Take this as an interesting challenge. Explain the situation to your manager - that you'd either need a lot of time to get this working or will need help from someone more experienced.
This kind of assumes some stuff that might not be true.
1. The database is some open source project like Postgres or Mysql and you can easily grab containers for it from dockerhub.
2. Somewhere in the code there is a schema file for the database (assuming it is a db that has schemas) so you could at least init a local copy of the database schema (although it wouldn't have any data in it, you would have all the tables) in your docker-compose setup.
3. Once you have the app and the db in docker-compose then come up with a way to seed the db with some dummy/test data (not a full dump of the real database, as you mentioned it is quite large, just enough data where you can see things working in the app).
You do that and show your manager, and they will quickly start throwing more stuff at you. You will also gain a reputation as some who takes initiative.
Good luck.