In those systems there were far fewer tools, far fewer options, and much simpler workflows, so honestly I didn’t need to endlessly flip through manpages to sift out hundreds of options with arcane, incompatible, unintuitive syntaxes. The few options we needed to memorize were always paired with consistent syntax and impeccable mnemonics to remember (who can forget ‘ls -l‘ or ‘rm -f‘?)
Ironically, ‘vi‘ was already quite evolved, complex, and arcane by this point, but that was completely different: it was required for us to acquire proficiency in order to code, and it was easy to build skills from basic to expert/power, and all ‘vi‘-editing commands still featured those standardized mnemonics and consistency that can only come from a proprietary single-entity codebase. Plus all possible legacy compat with ‘ed‘ which nobody used directly anymore!
So while we may today consider this a lacuna in the reader tool, it wasn’t by design, and I blame the explosion of “GNU long options” and lack of standardization, more than anything. But also ‘tar‘ and ‘ps‘ and BSD vs. the world. Eff those guys.