There have never been "just man pages" in Unix. E.g. V7 had a number of papers (in troff format which could be rendered to the terminal or sent to the printer in finite time) that helped with understanding how to use the system (assuming you had more than the bare minimum disk space on your machine).
Yes, and I bought some of those at the campus bookstore. What I meant was that if you want to know how to do a recursive grep or something, man was the main resource. There was no google or stack overflow.
Now they make my eyes glaze over, probably because every command now has 57 options. I just google how to do the thing.