But when it comes time to do actual accounting, there is a whole host of much more complicated concepts - depreciation, capitalization, tax law, tax law, tax law, etc. And these never seem to be explained in any comprehensive way that would make me think I "know" accounting. Rather it's like the pedagogy is focused on basic math (which people call "accounting"), because you will only learn all of the details with experience.
I even felt this same divide when I tried out Quickbooks, which I had thought was one of the gold standards for small business accounting. I was hoping for something that would walk me through how I needed to categorize expenses, track assets for depreciation, etc. Instead I was greeted with basically a spreadsheet replacement to automate problems I didn't have (eg printing checks at scale).
Am I wildly off base here, or is there something else I'm missing?
Taking a look at the site posted, it does seems to have many chapters with later ones covering advanced topics. But for instance taking a look at the chapter on depreciation, there are still additional details you'd actually need to do your taxes. I can understand how a simpler model helps someone learning this as their "first field", and they'll learn the richer model later. But from the perspective of someone who knows how to program, I'm still left wondering what value there is from reading general guides versus eg directly digging into what tax law forces you to calculate.