Closer personal example: I spent weeks trying to bully a supervised machine learning approach into a reinforcement learning one, because the 800-page reference book I used (that claims to cover all machine learning, and is well regarded!) in no way acknowledges the existence of this sub field. For whatever reason, and across multiple fields, I've never found static text to be good at "here's what you should be looking for", and I don't think it's reasonable to discount that knowledge as being valuable.