The problem with Texinfo is that it predated HTML and is now thoroughly obsolescent. There is value in being able to generate a printed book, and to have other

The problem with Texinfo is that it predated HTML and is now thoroughly obsolescent. There is value in being able to generate a printed book, and to have other formats. But the generated Info format is completely eclipsed by HTML. It existed in a world where we weren't allowed to have proper figures or tables, and linking was very limited. A world like a traditional Emacs buffer. The "info" viewer was despised, and with good reason. None of this is not to say that GNU didn't do a good job with documentation. The documentation is often excellent. But the documentation format and tooling needed replacing two decades ago. Texinfo is an anachronism. It's painful to author (I have written a Texinfo manual, later replaced by DocBook) and limited in its output capabilities. But today we have Sphinx and other tools which are greatly superior in their ease of use and capabilities. While in some respects Texinfo was more structured than troff dot codes, it was at the same time vastly less flexible with its formatting, figures, tables and equations. troff let you use tbl, pic and eqn etc. I personally find it easier to search a single massive manpage than hunt through all of the Info nodes. The nagivigability of Info documents is atrocious. But that's all ancient history. Both troff and Texinfo are several decades out of date at this point. Arguing which is better is pointless when both have been eclipsed by far superior replacements. Which can generate manpages, HTML and PDFs with ease.