“you should be smart enough to figure this out from here” bravado probably for some cases.

You do realize that writing good docs takes time, skill, and effort, right? Not to mention the docs you're scorning at was most likely written on someone's spare time who has no obligation to do so.

When you have some people not doing it, that's fine, they own their time. When you have have almost no one doing it, that's a cultural issue. I'm saying Linux/Unix man pages have inherent and probably very old cultural issues leading to a lack of baked-in examples.