They give you an intro to everything you asked them to show you, it takes 20 seconds, it’s featured front and center after every upgrade. And if you ignored it because you are trying to do something like right now, you can even go back and look at it again. It’s really pretty handy and nicely produced.

Yet if it's needed only because they continue to change things around and make basic functions more obscure... why is that a good thing?

And I still don't want to spend 20s. You can call that silly, and you're not completely wrong, but watching some stupid iMessage tutorial in my prescious free time isn't exactly something I want to do.

Power users prefer increased functionality over discoverability. Similar to how the command line is foreign to most computer users. For iOS, you're on the "prefer discoverability" side of the spectrum; Apple seems to build more for "prefer advanced/invest time to learn".