The opposite view of what you criticize is the Stockholm syndromey "documentation is for losers" where you should "just read C-headers for how to interface, or

The opposite view of what you criticize is the Stockholm syndromey "documentation is for losers" where you should "just read C-headers for how to interface, or the actual library code to figure out what the library does". In this view, asking for help or admitting to not knowing or understanding something is a sign of weakness and incompetence. Thus, people who ask questions aren't worth a competent™ person's time. My view: the purpose of documentation is to help people achieve their goals using your tools. Do everything that helps this purpose and don't do things that don't help it. Does the occasional "simply" help the purpose? I would say it almost never does. Telling users whether a step is simple is meta-commentary that distracts from the actual steps and is only useful if it helps people make decisions ("choose way X to do Y because it's simple"). People who sprinkle "simply" into documentation seem to rarely think about whether it serves a real purpose. 50-minute step-by-step tutorials are very useful when your goal is just to do that thing. This conforms to my view that tutorials and documentation serve the purpose of allowing people to achieve goals. You might feel instead that there should also be some pedagogical goal. People who read your documentation should become smarter, think outside the box, learn patience and perseverance that is required for their craft, etc. I think the real debate here is about this fundamental distinction of what purpose documentation serves.