While I do agree with you, I haven't found the lack of depth in register-level documentation too limiting. On the other hand, I find esp-idf much easier to use than STM32 HAL library and a lot easier to integrate in projects (I do like cmake).
With STM32 they often have 3+ different kinds of timers (advanced, basic, sometimes also low-power). Instead of having one chapter about all of them and saying this and that feature is only available in TIM1, they will copy&paste the 100+ pages chapter for every kind of timer... They must be auto-generating this stuff somehow.
edit: The NRF52 docs and architecture are much nicer than both (the registers seem to be designed by a programmer not a hardware person).