It's 2024 and people still watch documentaries believing it makes them more knowledgeable. This and a myriad of podcasts and stupid self published (or not) books.
That’s like saying books are edutainment because Dianetics and Freakonomics exist. No medium is universally good or bad, only what specific people make with it.
Most books are garbage and books that entertain you are edutainment, yes.
And yet your sweeping claim is still incorrect. That’s the only thing I’m objecting to here: identify specific titles, sure, or even companies but it’s just silly to say the entire genre is useless.
who said it's useless? it simply isn't education, and most of it is garbage
Again, that’s incorrect as stated. You could qualify that to say some fraction isn’t educational, or that you don’t think it’s educational enough, but in the broad form that claim is grossly overstated.
I used to love documentaries but eventually noticed that they usually had rather low information density. A documentary that took two hours to watch often could be summarized in an article that took five to ten minutes to read.
I used to like documentaries a lot but after Discovey/NatGeo started to do dramatisation in almost all documentaries, most of the substance was exchanged by irrelevant dialogs along the way plus factual inaccuracies are rampant.