to be fair, it sounds like the author only referred to the manual after making uninformed decisions.
And if you decide you want to "win" here and thus stubbornly reply "yes" then I'd say "you are the vanishing minority".
Approaching a piece of tech -- that's yet unknown to you -- with expectations is natural. Sometimes with tragic results but still completely natural for us the humans.
My approach is to firstly skim the index and look at anything interesting, secondly just use the docs as a reference while I learn the technology, and thirdly come back and read them cover-to-cover (skimming over the boring/irrelevant bits).