> My usage of manpages would increase by orders of magnitude if I knew there were examples of actual working commands in the first page.

Try adding ManKier as a custom search provider for Firefox or Chrome, it is online man pages beginning with TL;DR examples at the top of each web page, followed by the traditional man page entry below. Here is a fuller explanation with links to instructions for adding it to your browser: https://www.mankier.com/about

I use it almost exclusively now, and only refer to my distro's man page in a terminal if I need to check on something that isn't standardised (such as sed -i.bak or something like that).

Custom browser search is pretty handy, try adding a dictionary and map provider too, or 'caniuse' if you do front-end work.