Moreover, man pages serve as an essential resource that is much more reliably available than any other - when my network's routing packets in circles, the database server's on fire, and the duplicate has repeated the last transaction on every record, I don't care how "most users" don't use man pages or that web documentation is much more Google-able; I care that I have access to complete, detailed information (not the abbreviated version provided by --help) on all the utilities available to me; I care that apropos can help me recall the names of utilities I don't remember (something the article does not address); I care that I don't have to worry about having access to documentation, in addition to everything else, because it's all in a single, standardized, effective repository of man pages.

I really can't express strongly enough how much I disagree with the view that man pages are no longer relevant or necessary.

I myself also love reading man pages, but speaking of compatibility, I have to say that “--help” is a more universal way of showing help pages. Of course it’s better to have both of them though.

--help is fine, but almost never a substitute for a full man page, except for the most trivial of applications (unless your --help is as complete as a man page, in which case... good on you for providing full documentation, but I'll hate you a bit every time I unthinkingly drop two hundred lines of text in my terminal.)

Unless it just opens the man page if it is so long. Like git.

I strongly suspect that --help is on the contrary less universal, given that there exist entire toolsets lacking the --help convention but having manual pages. There was almost a quarter of a century's worth of Unix tools that developed before --help was invented.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/416796/5132

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207136/

How can you say it's less universal when it doesn't work on windows?