I can understand this situation happening because of lack of development resources. Like - yeah, it's easier to just let the community to write the documentation and concentrate on the game, if you're small company.
But why would it appeal to the actual players? It's not really secret knowledge, there are wiki websites with all the recipes.
I’ve long mulled on the idea of some kind of game where large aspects of it are randomized/generated so that no two installations would have the same stuff, recipes, whatever. I think that’d be neat and get rid of the website issue.
Like here Hades has a wiki list of all "Keepsake" items and their bonuses and abilities [0]. So you can always know the Old Spiked Collar always gives 25/38/50 HP bonus. What if instead of 25 at the first tier, it was a random range from 15-35. What if there was a chance it gave a damage boost instead? Or resistance against physical damage. Or it gave lightning a 30% bonus, or....
Basically everything shuffled and procedurally generated to the degree that 2 players discussing the game would barely have an overlapping experience aside from the general genre being the same.
It would be really hard to make it so every playthrough has some semblance of balance though, and for things to narratively make sense, e.g. Iron items should always be stronger than copper items etc.
[0] https://hades.fandom.com/wiki/Keepsakes#List_of_keepsakes
If it's a "random range from 15-35" that's what the Wiki will say. Worse, if you've coded this slightly wrong and it's actually 15, 18, or 20 to 35 with no chance of 16 or 19, that will be on the Wiki. If you have much better shot at 30+ if you were holding the "jump" button as you picked the collar, that too finds its way to the Wiki if there are enough players.
The exact same thing which drives humans to find out how the hell it's possible for some atoms of the same element to be heavier than others (more neutrons) will also drive players of a very popular game to figure out the fine details of how it works.
Don't add balance by the way. In single player games it's probably futile (players will break it anyway) and you may destroy the fun elements in the game in a quest to "balance" it properly, like taking a delicious tart and turning it into mush fit for a baby. Even in a multi-player game, prefer to make everybody unbalanced rather than trying to homogenize them. If rock smashes scissors, but paper wraps rock, and scissors cut paper we've got a game, it's not a very good game, but it's at least a game.
It probably wouldn’t be balanced but it’d be fun.
Similarly with Minecraft, an online community got built around these wikis, figuring out stuff much beyond simple crafting recipes. We’d never get the cart boosters, water elevator or optimal mining techniques if everyone just played off the tutorial.