Yep, especially when so many instances of TFM were awful. Perl's docs were fantastic, or so at least I thought at the time, but they were the first large open source project docs I devoured. I can imagine someone coming from another language not even considering just looking at the man page because they were used to awful documentation.

You are right, Perl's docs are so unusually good that newcomers can't believe they don't need the internet to find clear answers, and go searching/asking anyway, sometimes in wrong places.

FreeBSD has the same problem: plenty of its new exploring users dismiss the most well-intentioned advice to read its excellent Handbook as a sort of joke.