I will concede that nobody posted the question, but I do think RTFM is still appropriate as a surprisingly large number of people here apparently have not done so. Because it's written in a man page, it's certainly not locked away. And reading it is hardly going to extreme lengths. Man pages are precisely there to be an easy way to look something up, and are written and maintained by the community, so they certainly qualify as community curated knowledge. It's also a much more efficient way of spreading information than a blog post. I'm not sure where you get the notion that man pages are for a select few and not for everyone. They're also all on the web so it's easy to search their contents as well.

I would take the position that anyone who hasn't read the man page for something is a bit of a neophyte, or a novice at best. Unless perhaps they've read the source. How else are you going to learn something, without reading the documentation? Online tutorials and blog posts make for a poor substitute at best, and being less direct often introduce inaccuracies and other misinformation. I think it's fair to say that someone whose entire knowledge of a subject is based on incomplete information is not an expert. Not to say that man pages are perfect; they can be outdated and inaccurate themselves. But perhaps if more people read them, more people would submit revisions to make the documentation better. If suggesting that people read the proper documentation makes me an elitist asshole, so be it.

I don't quite agree with your 15-20 years timeline; GNOME and KDE were only founded about 15 years ago, and it was a few years before they matured to the point where decent windowing support was commonplace, so it wouldn't have been a given that you would have a full GUI environment at that time. Opening and closing xterm in twm was enough of a hassle to warrant using screen to accomplish windowing instead, which is much more esoteric than ~. Using ssh from an actual console without a GUI was still pretty common at the time, at the very least as part of setting up a box to the point where it had a GUI. But that is all beside the point. ~. takes less time than closing a window/tab and opening a new one, be it through a mouse or a keyboard sequence. And it doesn't nuke your scrollback history. This is just as true today as it was 15-20 years ago. If it's still useful enough to vote up a post, it should be useful enough to read about in a man page.

More people should be like the guys who hang out in IRC help channels. If you think they're there just to tell people to RTFM, you are very much mistaken. They are generally genuinely helpful people. However, they're not inclined to be as helpful to people who come waltzing in demanding everything they want to know handed to them on a silver platter, when they could have looked it up themselves with minimal effort. I don't think it's wrong to point out that there's no place for that sense of entitlement. However when someone asks a question who's clearly done their research but is still stuck on an issue, you'll find the same people who normally respond with RTFM will do everything they can to help. I don't think it's too much to ask to take enough consideration of their time not to waste it with something that can be answered in the first page of Google results. I would posit that instead of these people being labelled elitist assholes, a lot of people should be labelled entitled assholes instead.