Us the 90s kids grew up with the idea of ‘internet as a library’, which means websites are treated as books or magazines inside the shelves, that serve as repositories. We still have to read, but we were also used to it.
Perhaps it’s a generational shift, but nowadays ‘internet as an assistant’ approach is gaining over, which means the search bar (whichever it happens to be from) is treated as a search engine, and user directly inputs a semantic question expecting it to be answered. Users don’t expect to read, and aren’t expected to. Advertisement space is far more important.
When you think of that way, the idea of having a chatroom instead of proper support forum start making sense, even if I dread this idea and prefer proper text.
I could be far more tolerant of this if they had at least a FAQ section somewhere. Most times they don’t even pin the important or repeated messages.