Worldbiulding, where to start?

I have heard of many different approaches to worldbuilding but find they generally fall into two basic categories, Big to littlie and Littlie to big. let me explain further you have completed the first Important step in worldbuilding that is deciding you are going to make a new world but need to decide where to start.
here are the basics of Big to littlie and Littlie to big
Big to littlie: you start by building the most core aspects of what makes your world special weather it be creation myths or the Ages of the world history and the grand scheme of things is where you start gradually working your way down so that by the time you have made the town or city where the PC's are from you know everything Influencing it from history to government.
Littile to Big: you start with a town or city those who take this to an extreme often also isolate their players on an Island, focusing only on making what the players are interested in and want to know and building those In great detail, you might know every tavern in the Town and know all the royal family and have created various factions and organizations which you hope will Interest one of the players.
Obviously these examples are the far extremes of both method but I want to know
1: which category do you see your worldbuilding fit into and why?
2: how Involved are you players, or would you like your players to be in the building of the world

I started my world with Little to big. Made a local map and desided what each major cities primary income came from. Fishing, mining, academia ect. Then I took my previous gamemasters pantheon of gods and killed them all. I now had a divine lore, but no active gods.
Then I asked myself: What happened to the prayers? The people praying, generates divine mana, and it has to go somewhere. Then I invented some sleeping gods. How I had an economy, mundane and divine, I would build on. But enough to start with.

It was important for me that stuff had to make some kind of sense

Vibes to Stories: I get general ideas of how I want the world to look, a basic gimmick for the game usually, but I fill in details as players bring their character ideas. Usually their hopes for the story impact my worlds the most, and I've always enjoyed it :)

For my soon-to-be-starting 5e game, I went in knowing one thing: I want to play in a big desert, with all the fun Egyptian/Arabic/fantasy desert trappings.

Once I had some players, everyone chose a race, with the assumptions that the "vanilla race" of humans were already there. We worked together to assigned a "personality" to the race, much in the same way Forgotten Realms already have for their races (dwarves like mines and are stubborn, elves are haughty and love a good tree, etc).

Then it kind of spitballed. Because religion is so important mechanically to 5e, we decided that individual gods created one race each. I was thinking the other day about the video game Morrowind, remembering there was a living, breathing god named Vivec that hung out in a temple. You could just go talk to the guy, and if you swung at him he'd fight back. I loved the idea of gods inhabiting a body in the "meatspace", so I threw that into the mix.

I liked the faction idea of Ravnica and the piety system in Theros, so I duct-taped them together and threw them in the pot.

By now we've got a pretty good stew going. I wanted to do a hex crawl, so I needed a map, so I'm putting one together. The map needs names and felt pretty empty, so I started putting dots on the map and putting names on the dots. I don't know what's at the dots yet, but I figure I'll decide that when it comes up.

I've encouraged the players to invent pretty much all they want. If they're from a city, they're free to name it, tell me what it's like, and so on. If they were a part of some historical event, they're free to add on to it. I add those ideas into the world, and take their backstories, chop a piece off, and throw it into the pot.

Please take my opinions with a grain of salt, because I haven't homebrewed anything before or DMed a long-term campaign before. This is a whole lot of "figure it out as I go along." I've done a little bit of digging into how worldbuilding is done, so I had heard of the "big to little" and "little to big" mentalities. I guess I'm both? Get a foundation and framework put together (the big part: what are the gods and factions and their general philosophies) and then I go little. I know where I want the story to start, so I name that city and give it a feel. I know where the next place players are likely to go, so I name that city and give it an identity.

I've got a general idea of what I want the campaign to be, but beyond that, I'm laying down tracks as we move forward. I'm pretty excited to see what kind of world the players and I build together.


EDIT: I should add, I saw a simple piece of wisdom that really helped me figure out how to flesh out the world: "This, therefore....what?" The general idea being if we invent something, like say, "Orcs are green because they're actually plant-people. They don't eat, they photosynthesize, and are cultivated in big gardens". Well, that's really weird and cool, but therefore....what? How does that affect the world? Who tends the gardens? How did that get started? How do they reproduce? Do they flower? How does that influence the way that orcs are seen in the world, or how the orcs see the world? Are they warlike or peaceful? Do they gather in groups, or are they generally independent? Are they active or sedentary? It all spirals off into fun directions that will influence your world as a whole.