Doing this by hand is challenging but possible.
First you need a hex editor, not a text editor. xxd on linux will get you started but you might want something a little more user friendly.
Then look for a label for a value you know, xxd and other hex editors will show ascii text on the side. Hopefully you’ll be able to identify the value (in hexadecimal, probably 4 bytes but could be 1, 2, or 8 as well) somewhere before or after the label. You might have to get familiar with endianness, two’s compliment, and binary floating point before the numbers make sense.
Once you know how to read a value after a label you’ll need to find some label for the information you don’t know. If it isn’t displayed in the program it might not have a super readable label.
I disagree. Each distro is a user of a thousand different open source systems. When a distro developer integrates gnome, systemd, bluez, or whatever other system they’re finding, reporting, and possibly fixing bugs that end users might miss. Other than arch users, who else is compiling these things from scratch and really digging into the documentation?