Call me crazy, I’d just rather read the relevant section of code I am working on and be able to understand it from there, rather than first having to understand the entire universe.
When working with a framework, it helps to understand the framework. Then, all the individual pieces make better sense. The advantage is that you only have to gain this understanding once.
A framework is a social contract, if you will. The framework authors are taking on the onus of some complexity to give you a cleaner and easier to grok codebase. The tradeoff is that you do need to read the guides or you will be diving deep into framework internals whenever you want to understand some app level code.