I definitely can't absorb the meaning of two pages of turn-order and action-economy description faster than a one-minute demo of someone taking a turn can convey the same information. I can read it that fast, maybe, but it'll take some more reading and maybe some scratch paper to sort it out, or even busting out the game and stepping through it with the pieces as if I were playing. That's all way slower than a video.

I agree that in practice lots of explainer videos waste a ton of time with intros and such, but thirty seconds of good video can easily replace ten minutes of reading and re-reading.

[EDIT] Put it another way: if you're trying to decide whether to get a game, do you read the rule book? I'd put that after videos of play, which are by far the most useful thing for this, followed by written first-time play AARs (a huge step down from a video, but serviceable), followed finally and distantly by the rule book. This is entirely because getting a sense of how a game actually plays from a rule book is hard and slow.