I read manuals, back-to-back. Admittingly, I skip legalese disclaimers because they are intellectual noise. However, many manuals contain golden nuggets of information revealing that most people misuse a certain product or don't use it the best possible way.

A well written manual can be a teaching lesson about the relevant stuff given by domain experts for regular users. Who'd say No to that?

Hacker News commenters seem to be a poor representation of the average population.

Heaps of people read the manual.