Short answer: Yes.
RTFM (read the f-ing manual) is a common response on Web fora to people’s naive questions about something (Aside: there’s nothing wrong with a naive question; it’s the arrogant answers that are the problem).
I believe the earliest I saw the RTFM response was in the mid 1980’s (on dial-up services and newsgroups), but it was a common comment in Silicon Valley customer service departments long before then (“why didn't they just read the manual?”, though often much more pithily put).
The proper response really should be RUM (read and understand the manual). It’s in that U (understand) where sometimes you’d need to ask further questions, as the current state of camera manuals is that the less said, the less cost to the camera company (even if all they do is provide you a PDF manual, as they contract out a lot of that work; Nikon’s latest Z8 manual has many entire pages of nothing more than “The X function does X.” Enlightening ;~).
The problem that triggers people to ask the question in the headline has two key elements: (1) people’s time is limited, and reading a 200-900 page manual takes time; plus (2) many of today’s products are highly complex and have enormous numbers of options and interactions.
Before I continue with that thought, let me get one other thing out of the way: some manuals are beyond terrible. My mom’s Panasonic telephone answering machine and phones come with a manual. That manual is (a) in short hand; (b) seems to be the result of the worst sort of Japlish translation; (c) covers a UI that was easy for engineers to create but impossible for users to understand; and (d) has errors, omissions, and inclusions of things not in the product (!). I’m sure someone at Panasonic thought they had done their job, but that job turned out to be “confusing the customer way more than they were already confused.”
Another (mostly) unnoticed thing is that if you’re buying at the front edge of a product’s availability, you get a manual that wasn’t particularly well proofread, and perhaps incomplete or even wrong about a few things. The camera companies don’t notify you that they’ve produced an updated version of the manual, though they do sometimes tell you that there’s a supplement to the manual. If a product has been out for a year or more and you downloaded an early PDF, it’s probably a wise idea to download the current version and see if it’s been changed any. I’d say that seems to happen 20% of the time when I try it.
All that said, there’s another type of question that comes into play. This past week I’ve fielded a couple of “why is my shutter speed stuck at 1/125, which can’t I go lower?” type questions, and I saw that repeated in an Internet post, too. The answer is that these users have set Pre-release capture to 120 fps. You can’t take 120 frames a second with a 1/60 second shutter speed; you’d only get 60 ;~).
This is someone not fully understanding what it is they’re trying to do in the first place. It’s not that they haven’t read the manual (it’s in the manual, but buried in a footnote), it’s that they aren’t fully understanding what it is they’re trying to do. They’re trying to use an advanced feature—probably because it was marketed so well—when they don’t fully understand or remember a fundamental construct of photography: shutter speed dictates how long the camera is collecting light, and the slower the shutter speed, the fewer images you can take in any given time period.
I’m not sure there is a good book for introducing photographic concepts in all their forms these days. Which makes the intersection of “complicated new camera” and “complicated photographic concepts” a minefield for customers. You can kick half the mines out of the field by reading the manual that came with your camera, though.
Finally, I should point out that buying your sophisticated new camera from a good local camera store can help, too. Really good stores have training programs, sometimes free, that you can take and which will get you up to speed faster. You’ll still need to read the manual, though ;~).
