Find the tutorial in the guided_examples folder.
Simulators publicly available pretends to be easy to use, but in practice they are not.
gem5 is the most popular simulator. Used a lot in research. The main problem is its complexity. To learn the basics, the most common resource is a book. This is too much to pick up something quick. And then there is the mixture of C++ and Python. Countless hours are spent learning (and debugging) before obtaining something useful.
SystemC is tries to mimic hardware components with a terrible C++ API. Well adopted in industry. It is supposed to work in theory, but in practice it is terrible (learning the library is not trivial, cannot have proper unit-tests infrastructure).
Creating a new solution from scratch is not easy, but it can solve the problems of the exiting ones.