Maybe it's been a while since you used a CLI when you weren't intimately familiar with it, or maybe it has been a while since you used an application that deviates from the -h standard (or that doesn't provide a manpage, opting instead for info), but I'd really hesitate to call this process self-documenting for anyone that doesn't already know the tool.
I've been using command-line interfaces for a pretty long time now, and I'm incredibly thankful that these days I can look something up on the internet and generally find a list of some examples on how to use things. Man pages are generally incredibly verbose in all the wrong ways (far too much information, far too little that you actually want) and the -h switch at best gives you some flags and descriptions that are fundamentally too short to teach you anything useful. There is no real global standard for what kind of flags or inputs do what things (for example, far from every program with a CLI interface will actually accept "-" as an input file even though that's one of those things a lot of people use and should therefore be pretty obvious), further obfuscating the core workings of anything you might be using.