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As someone who did IT 30 years ago, this isn't really true. Manuals weren't very good for direct troubleshooting except that they provided insight into how the device or software works. In my experience problems were mostly solved by people who knew what they were doing, with occasional reference to the old guy who had seen all the weird obscure shit no one else even knew was possible.
There was no manual for the windows registry for example, so when I needed it to not shit the bed on a new motherboard I had to dig into it myself and figure out that if I blew out the PCI bus enumeration windows would realize that it's gone and rebuild it with the new IDs and such for the new hardware on boot instead of looking for old IDs and eating itself when it couldn't find them.
Oh, man, finding registry info was like the Search for the Holy Grail (Monty Python style).
At one time I worked for MS, and was fortunate to stumble on some good tools for it (like an OLE browser, which is originally what the registry was designed for-it was actually called the OLE Registration Database on Win 3.1), and I acquired every resource kit I could find, and pored over them.
Yup, that shit was an arcane art known only to a few, and dared by even fewer. It was like writing modem initialization strings for US Robotics 9600 baud modems when they came out. The 9600DS/HST required an init string that, printed out on a standard dot matrix printer, was literally as long as my arm. Crazy.
Also I veeeery dimly remember something about OLE registration database.. but just that I've heard the name, I never messed with it.