In any case, even it it were only 10% it's hardly a symmetrical tradeoff. Those bottom 10% cannot play the game at all without the tutorial, while for the rest it's a few minutes of boring content in an otherwise hours-long game. Seems like a worthwhile investment to add the tutorial.
One of the examples in the article was about spending an hour on intro levels before getting to the "meat" of the game.
Plus, "a few minutes of boring content" is no small thing to trudge through.
Before responding, please listen to this musical piece in its entirety[1]. It's only about four and a half minutes long in an otherwise hours-long conversation, so should not be a problem for you.
The 10% most familiar with the game/genre/developer/controls don't need the tutorial, and know it. I'd argue it's not the bottom 10% least familiar with the game that are harmed by the skip option; they know they need the tutorial, and aren't significantly harmed by the presence of a discrete skip option.
The 10% that cannot play the game because THEY chose to use the skip option, and not to return to the tutorial when they can't figure it out, but instead give up and leave a bad review... they're the only population (against their will!) from the removal of the skip button.
I have 2 hours of gaming per day during the week if I don't have anything else to do, which is rare, so it translates more to 2 hours once every 5 days (weekend is ad-hoc).
10 minutes is roughly 8% of that time, so if the game doesn't hook within 30 minutes (that can be with a nice intro, with a FUN tutorial, or throwing me into the gameplay) it gets dropped unless I have a strong referral from a friend.
That being said, most videogames I play have skippable tutorials. Not sure if that's a new problem specific to AAA, i rarely play those (although returnal on pc was very recent)
It's the "expert gamers" who skip tutorials and then get stuck and end up all frustrated and angry because the game doesn't work exactly like God Of Thing I Played Last Week.
Your point kind of proves the opposite. Many players will benefit from tutorials, of course. But if making them unskippable helps the bottom 10%, who otherwise can’t correctly judge if they would need them, then we get unskippable tutorials.
The same bullshit applies to dynamic (cheating) difficulty levels, another bane of modern game design where you can’t get ahead by doing well.