Completely agree. I wanted to set up some simple traffic shaping on gcp and aws nodes my students will be using for some networking projects. I've used both netem and tc in the past, years ago, but I found the documentation still seems just as abysmal. The netem documentation in particular is impenetrable. It seems to sit at just the anti-sweet spot between being "low level", explaining in detail how the implementation actually accomplishes things, and "high level", explaining abstractions and concepts of how one might use the tool. The user is left with a mishmash of both, with no way to see how all the various extremely picky implementation details fit together into any kind of coherent usable system. In the end, I am left with the feeling that the code is probably a collection of hacks and spaghetti with no clear vision or goal of how anything works, and the documentation is just a reflection of that.