Don't worry, I'm with you on this one. It's a garbage format, and it's assuredly a willful lack of organization as an exclusionary tactic, used to alienate people on some level, and require degrees of subordination among those late to the party. Is it simply a natural defense mechanism, that preserves an otherwise autonomous complex system? Maybe...
It's used all over the internet, and it's, by turns, a passive aggressive posture. Some acquiesce, and others enforce. The rest abandon. Linux follows a similar pattern with RTFM.
The Linux community process, as an example, has graduated to exclusion through sheer volume, with shrugs all around, as if to say the world really is just that complicated. But it's not. Inertia makes the situation more complicated than things need to be, and that disorganization (which was originally a product of the "everything is a file/lots of tiny, specialized executable programs" philosophy started with UNIX, leaves everyone blameless and) offers advantages to what I've come to refer to as trivia sherpas, who understand the seniority they've accumulated, and wish to keep things that way.
It often doesn't start as anything malicious, and some of it really is incidental, but that it stays that way is no accident. Sort of like the petroleum and automobile industry dynamic. Neither was an ideal solution for the problems they solve, but once circumstances snowballed in a certain direction, we all got stuck with these elephants in the room. Is it possible to uproot and improve the situation? I wonder...