I’d say that a big part of it is a lack of discoverability. The reason people copy blindly, especially if they’re new to Unix-likes, is that there are lots of commands with lots of flags, each of which you just kinda have to know about. And they work together reasonably well (except when they don’t), but going from “I need to accomplish this task” to a particular command is generally going to require a Google.
But that’s the issue — discoverability. How to get from “I want to search” to man grep or “I plugged in my USB drive and need to get at the files” to man mount/man fstab/man something else. man pages are a decent reference once you know what you’re looking for (assuming they’re up to date, correct, and present on your system) but they aren’t anything like a replacement for Google.
On each of the two machines I have immediate access to:
$ apropos search
apropos: Command not found.
Aside from the obvious, man pages just aren’t the answer most of the time.
Part of the issue is that a man page is a reference. This is a necessary kind of documentation, but sometimes I want a tutorial and sometimes I want a cookbook. References are great for some things, but discovering new tools isn’t generally one of them. Obviously, you don’t have to write man pages that way, but almost all of the ones I see in the wild are.
Another part is that man pages as a resource have really atrophied in my experience. Lots of new CLI tools don’t have them at all, and lots of systems don’t have them installed even for older/core tools. The why is harder. I suspect that it’s a mix of tooling (e.g. needing to learn groff/troff to write them), search (your man pages aren’t indexed by Google by default like your GitHub readme), and culture. But I’m not sure.
