If you don't understand how to use sharp tools, you may hurt yourself and others. Documentation for fork() clearly explains why and when fork() returns -1. Those that find the man page lacking or elusive may get more out of an earnest study of W. Richard Stevens' book, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. In any case, every system programmer should own a copy and understand its contents.
It's still bad API design when naively handling an error case kills everything. Is there an inherent reason that the error value for a pid has to be the same as the "all pids" value? Unless there's a very compelling reason, it seems like very poor design, well documented or not.
This is the same sort of argument as strlcat vs strncat, and people can't agree on that one.
I'd argue every programmer. It's such a fundamental part of computers & operating systems that key concepts will come up again and again. Just the other day I wanted to learn about Docker/CoreOS/etcd only to realize that I have an embarrassingly lacking understanding of how UNIX works. I immediately went to the library to pick up this book and begin fixing a flaw of mine (even as a web developer).
But even if there was only UNIX... the entire point of a well designed system is to allow users of the system to reason about it on a high level, not a domain-expert level or even domain-intermediate level. As programmers we reason about code without worrying too much about gate layout on silicon. As non-system programmers we should likewise not need to worry about shoddy OS design.