What tutorial? The official docs are well-written and rightly don't show advanced features at the beginning: https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/document-struct...

> Isn't this literally worse than HTML?

Not in my opinion. How often does this actually come up in technical writing? I'm happy with one or two ugly edge cases if it means that the overall experience is nice: that's a perfectly fine tradeoff to me.