If you put it that way, it wouldn't be wrong to think of it as a disqualifying round

If I were holding a competition for bakers, I wouldn't feel obligated to include a paragraph explaining what a "bake-off" is. I knew what a CTF was years before I knew enough to compete in one; it's a central part of hacker culture going back to the mid-90s.

Every puzzle here places you in a different unfamiliar situation. The only "outright disqualifying" thing is whether you can figure out something on your own. You essentially failed the first test.