And as someone who, even nowadays, still points to the commercial manual pages for SCO Unix, HP/UX, AIX, Solaris, and suchlike, oftentimes for things that the GNU and BSD manual pages simply do not cover, I can tell you that you are quite wrong.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15541694

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/406545/5132

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/196471/5132

Here are the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Illumos, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD manual pages for the ls command:

* http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/man1/lsf.1.html

* https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_aix_71/com.i...

* https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-1461/ls-1.html

* https://illumos.org/man/1/ls

* https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ls

* http://man.openbsd.org/ls

And here is the GNU one from Debian Linux written (it says) by Richard Stallman:

* https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/coreutils/ls.1.en.html

As can be seen, the commercial manual pages are not worse, and are indeed in several aspects better than the GNU one. The same is pretty much true of the non-GNU free operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Illumos) as well.

Notice that ...

* ... only the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Illumos, and OpenBSD manual pages have examples (quite apposite considering the headline for this discussion)

* ... only the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Illumos manual pages explain that output falls into three basic forms

* ... only the Solaris, Illumos, and FreeBSD manual pages actually explain in detail the configuration of the colour scheme (HP-UX, AIX, and OpenBSD not having a colour scheme mechanism, in fairness)

* ... only the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Illumos, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD manual pages explain what the characters output by the -F option actually signify

* ... only the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Illumos, and FreeBSD manual pages explain that the time format used in -l changes according to how long ago the timestamp was (an odd removal for OpenBSD, considering that OpenBSD ls does the same thing)

... and so on.