I dunno IMHO there's a lot of rose colored glasses looking back at them. I cut my teeth learning Linux in the era of howtos and such of the late 90s/2000s, and it was a real mess. Someone on an IRC channel would tell you to RTFM and point at a guide, you'd read it and slog through pages and pages of bloviation about unix philosophy, incredible minutia about every CLI parameter (half of which don't exist anymore) or whatever and be even more confused than when you started. You'd go back to IRC and someone else would say oh yeah don't read that guide, it's old and not up to date. Here read this guide... and the process starts over again. There were some good guides, but it was really hard to find them and sort out the good from the bad.
I spent my teens installing linux from floppies and Infomagic CDs. Back then the distro would often by default include the howtos package bringing in the whole enchilada of knowledge.
They were generally relevant to the versions of software included, and updated when the rest of the system did.
Things started getting messy as everyone got connected 24x7 and increasingly diverged from what packages distros were shipping, and of course the HOWTOs in general just stopped getting maintained/created until we arrived at today's misery.
