Clarification: Just making fun of people(including myself) who watch shitty videos instead of official documentation.
Man pages are for people who already know a lot about Linux and understand all the nuances and understanding of Linux
Even after using Linux for many many years I still don’t understand wtf nearly all man pages mean. It’s like a fucking codex. It needs to be simplified but not to the extreme where it doesn’t give you information you need to understand it.
Tbh that’s most of Linux, not designed for average people, designed by Linux users who think that all others should know everything about Linux.
They also usually assume a lot about the users’ knowledge of the domain of the program itself.
In my experience, many programs’ man/help is very brief, often a sentence or less per command/flag, with 2 or more terms that don’t mean anything to the uninitiated. Also, even when I think I know all the words, the descriptions are not nearly precise enough to confidently infer what exactly the program is going to do.
Disclaimers for potentially dangerous/irreversible actions are also often lacking.
Which is why I almost always look for an article that explains a command using examples, instead of trying to divine what the manual authors had in mind.
l must be using man pages very differently from you. To me they are mostly the easy reference to check the available flags for a command, and sometimes the reference on available config file entries, e.g. ssh_config(5)
For those things I was using them quite soon when I started using Linux, because it’s quicker than googleing every time if you just need one flag or one option name. For more complex things, like tar-and-gzip in one which needs like four, I still google though.
Probably there are very complicated ones too, the ones explaining subsystems or APIs of the kernel, but those I don’t need as a user.
