Help with World Generation basics

I'm completely new to datapacks, although I have experience with gamedev and programming so it's not entirely foreign to me. Most tutorials online are outdated by several versions, or they assume that I already know how datapacks work (which I don't). I'm not trying to do anything fancy at the moment, just want to make this datapack functional. Eventually I'll add custom biomes, features, structures, etc. But atm I just want my noise settings file to work properly, as it seems to be doing nothing at all. I'm using the default floating islands noise settings, just for testing purposes. What am I missing here? I assume something has to reference this file in order to make it actually apply to my world.