[pnt12]

I agree with the sentiment, but a there is a caveat: not all documentation is created equal.

There's incomplete documentation. There's API documentation without examples (ie specification but no example/tutorial). There's outdated documentation!

I can also say that I started studying SQL by reading the docs for mysql, and after an hour I was still stuck inside INSERT or SELECT. Reading about all use cases in detail was not useful to learn a first approach to the queries!

So I'd say that this "truism" isn't always true. Sometimes the docs suck or don't provide the info you need at that time.