I agree that watching videos is a pain sometimes when you want specific information.

On the other hand, watching a person do the task can be a nice "breakthrough" from the eyes of a noob.

For example, I've watched some https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/ videos. I could have read an article that says the same things, but you get a nice context for the reasoning. You see the thing happen. It's nice for the programming perspective, perhaps not for looking up certain macros.

Watching Derek Wyatt's screencast was very motivating when I switched from TextMate but I don't think I've learned much from his videos. Everything goes too fast, you can't really move around the video in an intuitive manner and the guy is too distractingly funny.

Forcing myself to use Vim everyday for everything for a few weeks (and all the vim-related googling that ensued) sure helped me a lot more than these screencasts.

But again, those are very exciting and it sure helps to stay excited when you have a mountain to climb.

What about beginners that don't know that VIM has certain features?

A similar topic - where there's a feature you don't even realise you could take huge benefit from. The first time I was shown '.' for redo I thought "why would I want to use that?"