There isn't much wrong with the RM. You have to publish the info somehow and that is the best way.
Videos are the most annoying way to do anything - especially if the speaker speaks unintelligible English which is the case with the ST ones I watched.
Something needs to be done with the steep learning curve though and I think ST did the right thing with the MX for
initial hardware setup. There are just too many ways to screw up and one could spend weeks full-time getting one of these chips to run properly. And one will never know if it is marginal - look at e.g. some wait loops around the PLL setup. It is
after that, where it becomes debatable whether to go bare-metal. But even then MX is handy to get some code to examine.
As I posted in the other "support" thread, ST, a $14BN company, should have forum presence. Not for "obviously stupid" threads, but for the ones where the poster has taken care to frame the question properly.
I am probably older than you, and being ex CZ (left in 1969) I also read from an early age
there's just so many people on the planet which possibly have the knowledge
Lots have the knowledge (how many LWIP installations are there?) but they acquired it in employer time so aren't posting it
For example the "Monday-pm guy" who started the project I am working on has a great and inexplicable reluctance to post on a forum, even though he is not prohibited from doing so, and would gain from it (like I have, considerably).
More evidently, people aren't interested in helping somebody with "old stuff" like LWIP which is ~15 years old. Those who integrated it have long moved on. This is really clear from places like the LWIP mailing list, which has been dead for ~10 years.
I've been doing micro hardware and software since ~1980 but without the internet, I would never have got 32F4 hardware working, from just the RM.