Looking at the material here, I think you may be under estimating what is meant by "zero" here. To fully follow these notes you would need to have significant research-level knowledge of general machine learning techniques, with a good deal of specific experience working with neural networks (both in theory and application).

I think someone with a general graduate-level background in most fields of ML or computer science could acquire a working knowledge of the SOTA in a particular associated sub-topic after reading through a half dozen or so research papers and code. That doesn't seem unreasonable or surprising.