I do not think it is important why OTP team made the tradeoff, I think the only interesting thing is if new arguments appear to indicate that the tradeoff might be wrong we are willing to reevaluate.
docs: add support for ref-man man-pages by frazze-jobb · Pull Request #10237 · erlang/otp
I can only repeat myself in a huge thank you!
To the whole team that provide us with such great tools.
And to a team that is actually open to discuss, listen and react
(if needed) to the community.
Hi folks, happy new year! Just checking in on this, as AFAICT from the changelogs the man pages haven’t made it back in yet for 28.3 - any thoughts on timeline?
Thanks as always 
Yes, it is in, check OTP-19787 in release notes.
Happy new year!
Hi @frazze! Thanks a lot, don’t know how I missed that, but I certainly did. That’s a great new year gift! I’ll take a look - seems 28.3 isn’t in brew yet but I’ll try mise or asdf for now. Cheers!
Circling back - I couldn’t get R28 to build man pages on macOS with mise or kerl (I think mise and maybe even asdf use kerl under the hood anyway), and even doing OTP by itself was challenging (probably my setup) - BUT somebody’s done it and released it in Homebrew, so brew now has 28.3.1, and I’m back in business with the latest release including full man pages for the stdlib. Amazing. Thank you to all!