The problem is with man pages themselves. You shouldn't have to read 100% of something to find 0.1% of something. In fact, this concept is covered extensively in CS theory about sorting. Reading a manpage is less efficient than asking someone who already knows.

The man pages were broken into competent sections over multiple man pages. About 260 of them on this machine (not really: there is a change-tracking man page per release recently.) The 1st man page is an very compact index to them.

After that, each section is long but very searchable.

But I can see how many people never even noticed."Man page? what's that? what for?"

The trick is to already know how to use regexes to make searching the manpages easier! But you really have to nail down the rules for escaping when you want to search for perl's gnarliest sigil magic.

There are some manpages which are too long, and cumbersome but it's not a widespread problem I believe. In particular man perldoc is laconic and on point.

I don't think that RTFM is the best form to answer, but those who auto-reject "man" as an answer are definitely missing something important

Only locally, only for you, and only short term. You are wasting the time of the person you are asking, and you are learning absolutely nothing about the context of the answer. When the next question arises, you won't even know where to look, you will only continue wasting other peoples' time.